April 20, 2021
Data segmentation vs marketing personalisation: How, why and when?
Most businesses overwhelm their customers with massive generic sales messages. As a result, you see a higher unsubscribe rate and lack of engagement.
You probably ask, why do so many marketing messages seem so irrelevant and boring? The reason is that too many marketers attempt to target the whole subscriber’s list, and this, of course, loses the person’s attention. After all, the bigger the audience you target, your content becomes less personal. Therefore, segmentation and personalisation are used to provide relevant messages and content to trigger a higher response rate.
Personalisation and segmentation are going hand in hand – they both require a deeper knowledge about your contacts.
Segmentation
Segmentation is a breakdown of an audience into small groups such as; similar customer behaviour, purchase history, common interests, needs, and preferences. The goal of segmentation is to group similar patterns to create and fulfil a marketing strategy to understand better, target, and sell to these segments.
There are many methods by which segmentation can be done:
- Geographic
- Demographic
- Cultural
- Behavioural
- Psychographic
The type of segmentation needed depends on the overall intention of the marketing strategy.
Segmentation complexity
Inside every segment, you can drill down even further by applying ‘hyper-segmentation’, allowing you to create a relevant, personal message that would encourage users’ engagement.
Personalisation
Personalisation is a tactic that utilising machine learning and data to create personalised offers and messages. While segmentation targets people with common characteristics, personalisation is all about the individual persona. Being addressed as an individual speaks to the heart of everyone, and the online brand’s job is to assist with creating a better connection, authentically, that leads to loyalty. However, the key to efficient personalisation is more than just data analytics; it also demands artificial intelligence and machine learning skills that do all the hard work for you.
To sum up: segmentation and personalisation are the core of enhancing your marketing efforts. In today’s extremely competitive market, you can position yourself better among the competition by segmenting your data.
