The shotgun approach, the one size fits all, one for all. These techniques unfortunately don’t work very well anymore in the marketing world. With audiences getting smarter and more sceptical, campaigns in turn have got smarter, more targeted and personalised. Consumers can smell a generic mass email from a mile away, and they’ve become very comfortable with the unsubscribe button. If you don’t segment your data, your audience will lose interest very quickly.

Think Back to the Playground

Push your mind back to your school days (hopefully it wasn’t too long ago). There were different friendship groups with defining characteristics, right? The sporty lot, the gamers, the ones who actually did their homework. Segmenting data is similar: you want to group the data that shares similar interests, wants or demands.

There are two main ways to do it. The first is through behaviour: repeat customers, the ones who love a sale, people who regularly engage with your campaigns, browsers who fill a basket and vanish. The second is through demographic information: age, gender, company size, industry and so on. Which route you take mainly depends on what data you’re capturing about your audience, and in practice, the best segmentation usually blends both. A repeat customer in retail banking and a repeat customer in fast fashion might behave the same way, but they’ll respond to very different messages.

No Data, No Segments

Here’s the catch. If you don’t have this kind of information, it’s going to be hard to segment your data, your data governance strategy will struggle to take off, and you’ll be left with the shotgun approaches mentioned at the start.

So first off, make sure you’re capturing the information your company actually wants and can use. There’s no point capturing shoe sizes if you’re working for a bread manufacturer. Every field on a form has a cost, both in the friction it adds for your audience and the clutter it adds to your database, so capture with purpose.

Then make sure the data is standardised and cleaned periodically. Should the country be UK or United Kingdom? Is that one customer in your CRM, or the same person entered three times with three spellings of their name? Small inconsistencies like these seem trivial until you try to build a segment and half your audience falls through the cracks. Clean, consistent data is what makes every downstream decision trustworthy.

Segmentation Is the Foundation, Not the Finish Line

Once you’ve set it all up, remember that tailoring experiences is what your audience now expects, and you can only achieve it by segmenting your data. Segments let you send the sale announcement to the bargain hunters, the loyalty perks to the regulars, and the win-back campaign to the ones drifting away, instead of sending everything to everyone and hoping something lands.

And as well as making sure your data is secure, structuring it well for analysis and segmentation is imperative. Well-organised data doesn’t just power better campaigns today. It’s the foundation that everything else in your MarTech stack, from personalisation to prediction, will be built on tomorrow.

By: Matthew Lin