A Martech look at Segmentation

Year 2011:

When I studied marketing from a functional perspective – the word “Segmentation” had a different meaning. Segmentation seemed more of a theoretical concept.

Example: If you want to sell Coke to people, whom would you want to target for maximum revenue? Traditional marketing would ask you to club your audience in different groups (called segments) and then Target those segments, then position the brand accordingly.

Broadly, there are four different types of segmentation :

  1. Geographic: Region, Country etc.
  2. Demographic: Age, Gender, Income etc.
  3. Psychographic : Social class, Opinions, Personality, Values, Attitudes & Lifestyle
  4. Behavioural: knowledge, feelings, and attitudes towards products/services. Few more variables to think about this: Loyalty (Recency, Frequency & Monetary value), Occasions, Methods of shopping, Benefits expected, User status, adoption curve (early adopters, laggards etc.)

Coming back to the Coke example –

Do you want to target the 18 to 35 year olds? People from cities? People who are interested in snacks? Next part of the equation was to position and prepare a marketing mix for each of these segments. This is a pretty long cycle with no direct measurement and no precision.

Year 2018+:

Now, when I think of segmentation – I think of creative use cases and a database. Next step is to write a logic to use that database to filter out a group of people – basically segment them.

Limitless are my possibilities now.

For the purpose of this discussion – let’s look at Segmentation more from an Adobe Analytics perspective.

Marktech Segmentation

Adobe Analytics gives one an ability to create segments on the basis of

  • Dimensions or
  • Metrics or
  • Segments created or
  • Time Range

Geographic & demographic Segmentation

Using “dimensions” and “metrics” alone takes care of geographic, demographic and behavioural segmentation. Of course, you need to declare custom eVars & Props if you are interested in tracking something custom.

Behavioural Segmentation

Behavioural in this context becomes – what kind of actions visitors have exhibited on your site. I am able to do behavioral segmentation with ease using Adobe Analytics. Below are few examples:

  • People who have performed certain action on the site. Example below
    • Abandoned shopping cart
    • Visited a product page more than x times
    • Made a purchase in last x days
  • People who have come through a particular campaign and clicked on a product in the same visit. You have to use the concept of containers viz. “Visit” container in this case
  • People who have visited a series of pages together etc. Use cases like these can be achieve through sequential segmentation
  • People who have exceeded x number of orders within the last y days
  • People who have made a purchase of greater than a given amount in a single visit. In this case you will be using the metrics like Revenues

Add to this time ranges and rolling dates ex: last 60 days etc. This gives more flexibility to your segments.

If your CRM has Psychographic data then you can enrich your profiles to build a customer 360 degree view. However, a better place to do that would be the Adobe Audience Manager.

As you can see – doing Segmentation becomes very tangible and becomes a very direct part of your marketing strategy. It is no longer just a high level strategy concept.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.