Ten Customer Segmentation Examples

There’s a simple way to improve click rates on marketing campaigns by 74%: introducing customer segmentation. Email blasts are going the way of the dinosaur, and customization is the way to stay competitive. Customer segmentation means finding the right message, for the right person, at the right time - a winning recipe.

However, there’s quite a bit that goes into succeeding with customer segmentation. Not only do you need to choose the right segments that are relevant to your business; you also need to have the data to define them accurately. Once you have good data, you can start separating your customer base into segments and leverage the full power of customization in marketing.

How To Start With Customer Segmentation

Customer segmentation examples ultimately come down to gathering and analyzing data. That means having data on your customers or potential customers, which can come from forms, signup information, or polls. It means tracking customer behavior with your brand, such as visits to the company website or purchases they’ve made.

Once you have a method to track this sort of data and correlate it, you can define customer segments and analyze their behavior to produce actionable insights. While this may sound new, the truth is that you already use segmentation in your day-to-day life.

Examples of Customer Segments (That You Use Without Noticing)

A restaurant will treat guests who visit regularly with extra care, and most people offer special respect to the elderly. If you visit a new country, you might learn a bit about its customs and how best to get along with people there. Likewise, people talk about their interests more when they’re around people who also share those interests. Only one of these examples is a business transaction, but they all illustrate customer segmentation examples in different ways.

• Behaving differently in a foreign country is cultural or geographic segmentation

• Showing respect to the elderly is a type of demographic segmentation

• Talking about hobbies around interested people falls under the umbrella of psychographic segmentation

• Treating regular customers with special care is an example of two types of segmentation: value-based and behavioral

Now, let me tie these back to different types of ways you can segment your email list:

Segmenting people - the process of putting them into groups based on common characteristics - helps respect their individuality. Every person shares most of their characteristics with others, but combining these characteristics in different ways is a big part of what makes people unique.

Consider the variety of customer segmentation examples just under the umbrella of demographics; factors like age, gender, income, family status, and occupation play a huge role in people’s preferences. Categorizing people based on the intersections of these factors provides powerful insight into what they’re like and what makes them who they are.

How Customer Segmentation Answers Key Questions

There’s nothing more important in marketing today than knowing and catering to your customers. Holding onto an established clientele, getting to know them, and using that information to draw new customers decides the fate of any company. Answering important questions becomes easier after implementing customer segments. Examples of questions that customer segmentation can answer include:

• Who are our most economically valuable customers? Who are our least valuable?

• What elements of our services are the most important to our customers?

• How loyal are our customers, and what stage are they at in the customer journey?

• Why do some customers drift away from our brand, and how can we retrieve them?

• Where do most of our customers come from?

• What advertising avenues will provide the best ROI?

• Which style of advertising is correct to resonate with our customers?

• How can we retain the customers we already have?

Customer Segmentation Analysis Examples (Two Customer Segmentation Examples In Action)

The theory and studies are clear as to the value of customer segmentation. Examples help make it clear exactly how it works in practice. Basic segmentation generates potent insights into the makeup of your customer base, and deeper analysis illuminates how to use those insights.

1. Recovering Lost Customers

Tracking the customer journey is one of the most important types of customer segmentation. This is an example of customer segmentation by behavior; namely, their purchasing behavior in regard to the brand. Segments might include those who make multiple purchases a month, those who make one purchase per month, and those who haven’t made a purchase in more than a month.

Without segmentation, there won’t even be an awareness that the last group of customers have lost touch with the brand. Identifying this group and looking for commonalities between them provides insight into the offers that will draw them back, as well as how to prevent them from drifting away in the first place.

2. Leverage Strategic Timing For Your Newsletter

When you send your newsletter at the right time of day, it can make a dramatic difference in open rates. Finding the ideal time through trial and error might take months or much longer, but learning about the habits and timezones of your readers can help you refine your delivery window more efficiently.

For instance, imagine customer segmentation reveals that most of your readers work 9-5 jobs. In this case, you’d want to rule out busy days like Monday, Friday, and Sunday as send dates. By using the timezone information you gain from segmenting customers geographically, you can also narrow down suitable time windows and avoid sending the newsletter near the lunch break or at the end of the work day. Customer segmentation analysis examples help make good newsletter timing possible, boosting open rates and driving engagement in the process.

Ten Customer Segmentation Examples

There are dozens if not hundreds of ways to segment customers, but here some of the most important examples of customer segments.

1. Gender

Segmentation by gender is typically the first priority for any company that’s looking to generate analytics. Beng inclusive and providing non-binary options improves the depth of your data and resonates with many people’s values in one stroke. Furthermore, this is arguably the easiest segment to gather data for.

2. Age

Knowing the age of customers is a powerful resource, especially when you cross-reference it with other segments. When you know someone’s age and location, for instance, you can use that to predict a great deal about their beliefs and lifestyle.

3. Date-Based Segmentation

An easy, yet valuable type of segmentation to implement is date-based. It can be fixed and refer back to sign-in dates, or it can be dynamic and refer to things that change in the short-term. For example, segmenting customers who’ve signed up in the last 30 days allows you to interact with this key segment and guide their customer journey in the right direction.

4. Work Space

More workers than ever before make their living in circumstances outside of the 9-5 on-site job. Information workers increasingly work from home and the gig economy grows year by year. Knowing the way that your customers work provides valuable insight into their schedules, habits, and priorities. Plus, work spaces and habits make a major difference when it comes to sending your newsletters at the ideal time.

5. Personality

Just take a look at viral Twitter brands like Wendy’s or Steak-Umms to see the role that personality plays in modern marketing. Assigning personality traits to customers such as carefree, serious, or funny informs brand voice and helps you connect to customers. In some cases, a compelling brand personality can create new customers on its own.

6. Interaction History

Segmenting customers along their interaction history can look like grouping them based on how frequently they visit your website, the amount of time they spend there, as well as their purchasing habits (if applicable). Interaction history helps build an accurate picture of their current customer relationship status.

7. Last Customer Interaction

One of the most important customer segmentation analysis examples is a customer’s last interaction with your brand. This can highlight them as a target for customer retention efforts, as well as provide insight into the type of customers that tend to detach from your brand. Knowing who’s losing touch is essential to deciphering why, and knowing why it happens is the first step in preventing it.

8. Location

Location offers a variety of useful insights and adds depth to other data. On its own, though, it can help to fine-tune any time-sensitive decisions, such as when to send out newsletters, by revealing the reader’s timezone. Plus, there’s a wealth of public censuses, polls, and other data on the demographics of locations. Just by segmenting customers by location, you can start to correlate all of these other data sources.

9. Pain Points

Depending on the type of company you run, you can extrapolate data on pain points from their interaction history with your company or through polling and other direct requests for information. Segmenting customers by pain points immediately underlines the foundation of that customer relationship, which guides the creation and refinement of customer avatars.

10. Date of Birth

An easy method for segmentation that translates into simple, actionable personalization is date of birth. Sending custom messages to customers on their birthday, with or without special offers, is a valuable way to strengthen the customer relationship.

Customer Segments Examples (Closing Thoughts)

It’s not enough to batch and blast content to as many recipients as possible. No matter what field of marketing you’re working in, the first step to success is understanding the customer and treating them as an individual.

With the help of beehiiv, you can gather the data necessary to choose the right examples of customer segments and put that knowledge into effect.

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