Achieving meaningful messaging for your customers is a hot topic right now, but it’s dependent on understanding the definition and differences between segmentation and personalisation. Marketers often use these terms interchangeably, but it’s essential for everyone to speak the same language reach their intended group more effectively.
For brands, the route to successful customer engagement is not plain sailing. Today’s consumer is flooded with more marketing messages than ever before and because of this, we’ve become adept at ignoring unwanted attempts to attract our attention. Adverts and promotional messages now easily fade into an ever-increasing sea of noise.
The reason so many messages seem irrelevant (and annoying), is because they are.
In the pursuit of quick wins, marketers focus on broad audiences and fail to embrace the concept of targeted marketing.
To succeed in a noisy marketplace, brands must demonstrate they understand their consumer, including their pain points, needs and wants.
To stand out, communications should reach the intended niche efficiently and effectively. This can be done through segmenting and personalising your activity.
But what do these terms mean, how do they differ, and why is this a valuable strategy to employ?
Read on, and we’ll give you all the answers you need.
Segmentation
When trying to implement a successful marketing campaign, targeting the right message to your audience is vital. If you try to talk to everyone, your message will be lost on a lot of people. Generic and sweeping communications are far less likely to resonate with your audience. This is where audience segmentation comes in.
Segmentation is the process of grouping your customers together using similar characteristics and features. It helps you break your entire audience into smaller chunks. You then use the characteristics they have in common to create relevant messaging.
There are four main types of segmentation:
- Demographic segmentation – based on age, gender, marital status, race, religion etc.
- Geographic segmentation – based on location.
- Psychographic segmentation – based on interests, values, and beliefs.
- Behavioural segmentation - based on brand interactions, purchasing, and spending habits, including sales funnel stages.
The practice of segmentation allows marketers to gather data. This data provides useful insights, to help them understand their audience. Once enough data has been collected, succinct and successful messages that resonate with their users can be crafted. This is the start of personalising a campaign.
Personalisation
Personalisation is the process of optimising and delivering messages and experiences to individuals themselves, not their segment. It doesn’t matter what group they belong to, you’re crafting specific messages, just for them.
Also known as individualised marketing, or one-to-one marketing, personalisation uses data that identifies a specific customer – such as their name, or purchase history.
The process identifies a user as an individual and the resulting campaigns deliver experiences and messages that are completely unique (and hopefully relevant) to them.
Types of Personalisation Data:
- A user’s name, or date of birth
- Their individual purchase or browsing history
- Specific interactions with your website or social media platforms
Often designed to look like a unique and personal conversation, individualised marketing tactics can seriously improve campaign effectiveness.
A name or a date of birth can provide useful personalisation data, but please remember, sending an email to a broad segment using their first name in correspondence (mail merge style), is not true personalisation. It shows you know their name – nothing more.
Truly personalised campaigns use real-time data that can help marketers create emotional connections and relevant experiences. These messages are significantly more effective at driving engagement and conversion.
Segmentation Vs. Personalisation
A common mistake is to think segmentation and personalisation are competing strategies. This isn’t the case. To seriously improve your marketing efforts, the two tactics should be used together.
Segmentation comes first, to help you decide whether you should be marketing to a consumer at all, and personalisation comes when you have enough insight into your audience.
The key to both segmentation and personalisation is reliable consumer information. Rich and dependable data will give you a better picture of your audience. The clearer the picture, the easier it is to segment, and personalise the experience.
Examples of targeted marketing
There’s one big player in the game of personalised marketing, and that’s Amazon. Amazon’s recommendation algorithm consistently makes the headlines for its successful application of strategically personalised marketing. The tool suggests products tailored to fit the individual based on browsing history, location, and aspects of a shopper’s personality.
So, Amazon have proven the value of this strategy, but it can work for smaller businesses too. Let’s say you’re a cake maker and you want to market to contacts that haven’t yet made a purchase with you. You could segment your list by those that haven’t yet purchased and have their birthday in the next 3 months. Send them a coupon for a birthday cake special offer and you’ll be speaking to their needs.
The Takeaway
When marketers understand the differences between segmenting data and personalising activity, they can use the approaches harmoniously together, to get to know their customers better, increase customer conversion and retention, improve lead nurturing and drive conversions.
With transpond, you can easily segment, personalise, and automate your marketing activity. To find out more, reach out to speak to a friendly member of our team. They’re on hand to answer any questions you may have and assist you in creating bespoke email marketing that talks your customer’s language.