Generic, one-size-fits-all messaging doesn’t cut it anymore – today's customers expect brands to deliver personalized experiences. To meet and exceed these customer expectations and stay competitive, marketers must master the art of segmentation and personalization, tailoring messages that cater to individual preferences. But to do this effectively, brands must rely on smarter data practices that can inform these strategies. Let’s explore how segmentation and personalization can elevate marketing efforts and why smarter data practices are crucial to unlocking their full potential. 

What is segmentation?  

 

Segmentation is the practice of dividing a customer base into distinct groups based on shared characteristics, such as demographics, behaviors, interests, or buying habits. By segmenting an audience, marketers can craft more targeted campaigns that address the unique needs of each group, rather than relying on generic messaging. 

And there are many ways to segment your audience, allowing you to build stronger connections with your customers. For example, you can segment based demographic attributes, which include geography, device type, gender, age group, or loyalty status. More advanced marketing teams would also segment by engagement level, last product viewed, intent to purchase, and other behavioral indicators that give an even more granular view so you can ensure your message hits home. The more specific you get, the more relevant you can make the content for each audience. Tailoring your messaging to fit each list shows your customers you know them and boosts engagement with your brand.  

What is personalization?  

 

Personalization takes segmentation a step further. It’s the process of using that narrower list to create customized content, offers, and experiences that will suit an individual’s specific preferences or behaviors – and it’s essential if you’re looking to turbocharge your customer engagement.

Simply putting the customer’s first name in the email is no longer enough, instead, find other ways to connect with their individual attributes, like delivering content that fits with their industry, city, product preferences, or job title. Then, craft targeted and meaningful messages that suit each customer’s buying stage — and perfect your timing to reach customers when they are most receptive.  

Best practices for more impactful segmentation and personalization

 

1. Start with clear goals: Identify which KPI’s you’re aiming to improve and identify a strategy to target that goal. There are endless ways to further segment and personalize your messaging, so starting with a specific target is important to stay focused and see results.  
2. Prioritize data privacy and compliance: Compliance regulations differ across geographies, so be sure you are always up to date with relevant requirements. It’s best to create a preference center where users can input their communications choices. And always make it easy to unsubscribe by enabling one-click unsubscribes in your emails or sending periodic messages to get confirmation that recipients still want to be receiving emails.  
3. Test and iterate: Testing is essential to succeed with your email marketing, and taking a data-driven approach can transform your campaigns. Experimenting with variables can help you learn what works with your audience and you’ll have proven data to guide your decision-making. A/B testing is one way to do this, as it helps you compare two versions of the same email to see what performs better.  
4. Focus on the customer experience: Don’t forget that each interaction with a customer is part of their full journey, not a one-off message. Keep that in mind as you build out your marketing strategy and prioritize the customer’s point of view when sending a message.   

Next-level data practices to fuel segmentation and personalization  

 

Enrich your data 

 

Enhance existing customer data with information from other sources, such as first-party data collected directly from a brand’s owned channels – think websites, email, SMS, or mobile push. Using first-party data helps brands build effective and compliant campaigns, while offering insights that are more accurate. This can open opportunities to deepen personalization efforts across your engagement strategy.  

Collect real-time data  

 

Layering in additional behavior and events insights can improve your segmentation efforts. One example method is RFM analysis, which segments customers based on the recency, frequency, and monetary value of their purchases with you. This method can help to improve customer retention rates, boost lifetime value, and be more efficient when allocating marketing spend so that you can focus on higher-value customers. Whereas RFM analytics and other similar segmentation methods previously meant laborious data analysis, the incorporation of real-time data allows for faster, more efficient analysis where you can create ad hoc, relevant messaging to target select segments. 

Leverage unified customer data management 

 

Most marketers have customer data pulling from numerous sources and consolidating that data to paint one clear picture of your customers is often a challenge. Choose MarTech tools that consolidate that data from various sources so that you gain a comprehensive view of each customer. Layer in behavioral and intent data along with real-time events to gain a nuanced understanding of your customers, beyond their demographics, so you can make data-driven decisions and tailor your marketing strategies to match their needs. 

How Acoustic Connect enables smarter segmentation and personalization 

 

The latest enhancements to Acoustic Connect are designed to enable improved segmentation, more personalization options, and increased data flexibility, leading to optimized customer engagement strategies. Let’s zoom in on two of these enhancements. 

Real-time segments 

 

With a real-time segment view being added to Acoustic Connect segmentations, users can instantly view the total size of the segment they are building, reach per channel, and the number of contacts across consent groups. They can tweak their selections and see in real time how that impacts the segment they are building.  

• Key benefit: Marketers can be more agile with segmentation, experiment with different segment mixes, and instantly understand their size and reach, ensuring they can make smarter decisions on the fly. 

Reference sets 

 

Organize and utilize your data with increased flexibility. Reference sets allow you to manage and segment data based on a wider variety of attributes, which means you can leverage customer data, product information, offers, and more. For example, you can categorize data based on behaviors like product purchases, incorporating attributes, such as transaction number, product, price, sale date, and purchase location. 

• Key benefit: Unlock richer segmentation and personalization capabilities by leveraging additional data points, enabling more targeted marketing. 

Start building lasting customer connections 

 

Segmentation and personalization are critical tools for building stronger connections with customers, driving engagement, and ultimately boosting revenue. By integrating smarter data practices, marketers can elevate their strategies to deliver truly personalized experiences at scale. As data continues to grow in both volume and importance, brands that leverage these smart practices will be best positioned to thrive. 

To learn more about improving your segmentation and personalization strategy, check out our books Real-time data powers real customer engagement and How to make email work even harder for you. For existing customers, learn more about the new Acoustic Connect capabilities through the academy data management course and get your badge of completion.