Industry Use Cases Of Segmentation

Customer Segmentation – Per Industry Examples

Use-Case For Accounting

Many accounting small businesses are responsible for a few services. Keeping track of which of your clients wants what is important, and it’s likely you’re doing something along those lines already.

Corporate tax returns
Personal tax returns
Bookkeeping
Year End
Financing & Financial Statements
Payroll
Remittance
Accounts Payable

But this kind of organization can quickly become a marketing tool as well. Think about it. Let’s say it’s February or early March, and you’re going to be running a promotion for tax season (“This tax season, play it safe with a professional accountant. Now until April 1st, get 25%-off Acme Accounting!”)

There’s no point in targeting your corporate clients with a personal tax promotion. Equally, there’s no point in targeting individuals with information about payroll.

Call it an organization, if you will. But it will save you energy and increase your small business’ success nonetheless.

Use-Case For Consultants

Segmentation Strategy: Consultants, whether financial, marketing, or anything else, are big creators of content. The challenge whenever you create educational content is that not everybody reading it is within your target market. Anybody in marketing (myself included) doesn’t always become a leader with the best interests at heart. More often than not I’m downloading your guide, or ebook, or attending your webinar for my own selfish reasons.

That’s why it’s essential you determine who your leads are. After all, what’s the point in trying to nurture a fellow marketing consultant who’s just there to get a source for their own article?

Note: This is also essential for anyone in the real estate industry. If you’re creating resources, it’s likely that some of your competitors will be downloading them. Don’t waste your time, energy, or resources nurturing people who have no interest in buying.

Use-Case For Appliances/Hardware

The segmentation Strategy would be to create content that reviews product lines or provides more information that makes customers feel they are getting a good product for a good value:

“Looking to Purchase a Stove? Which One is Best for your Budget?”
“Ceiling Fans: What You Need to Know About the Top Brands”
“Heating your Home Without Breaking the Bank: 3 Top Brands”
“The Longest-Lasting Refrigerators you Won’t Regret Investing In”

Note: Be sure you remove people from this segment when they convert. In your segmentation of subscribers, simply remove leads if they no longer need to receive your campaigns.

How to use this segmentation strategy:

Deliver interest-focused popups and promotions the next time they arrive on the site.
If they’re subscribers, deliver interest-focused emails if you have a sale running.
Create a coupon (via email or popup) that is specific to the product line they’re interested in.

Use-Case For Photography

Segmentation Strategy: Your photography business is unlikely to just do weddings. Or just do anniversary photoshoots, baby and family shoots, grad photos, or birthdays. Depending on the season, you probably do them all.

There are a few options for the photographer’s segmentation:

Segment your website visitors based on pageview. If someone comes to your site and visits /weddings-gallery, you know pretty confidently what they’re interested in.
Segment your website visitors based on lead information. Add a timed popup to your website (30 seconds should do the trick) prompting them to “Subscribe to receive limited-time and subscriber-exclusive discounts! What are you interested in?”
Segment your clients manually. Did you just do a wedding photo shoot where the bride was pregnant? Add her to your “Family” segment. Just do a family shoot and the son was 17? Add them to your “Grad” segment.

Use-Case For E-commerce

Segmentation Strategy: Add an entry popup to your site asking visitors to provide their email addresses in exchange for a discount or free shipping. Add a dropdown or checkbox asking for a simple piece of information: Their gender.

Something like this (real-world) entry popup example from Revolve:

How to Use This Segmentation in your Small Business Marketing Strategy:

All new leads can be sent gender-based product offers
If they select “both,” be sure you send them a “shopping for someone?” email with popular products for both genders.

Another extremely important segment of your prospective customers is those who have shown interest in your products but have not yet bought them.

Add a workflow within your automation system that automatically adds visitors to a “Hot” list if they’ve added something to a shopping cart but not completed the sale. You can even use merge tags to take the product they’ve added and remind them it’s there, or give them 10% off.

Segmentation Usage Insights From Various Industries

Based on a user experience survey – insights on customer loyalty

When it comes to segmenting customers, too often companies rely on vague parameters like age, sex, or income that rarely capture consumers’ true motivations.

When we looked into creating a segmentation of our audience, we knew we didn’t want to make the same mistake. With some outside help from a market research firm, we crafted a user experience survey to see what each of our customers expected out of our company and how well they thought we were meeting those expectations at an individual level.

Based on the job position and business type

In my current role, we’re seeing a lot of positive outcomes in segmenting our audience. Because we serve various industries and get in touch with different buyer personas, customer segmentation is super important for us.

What do we segment?

Buyer persona: chef, restaurant owner, F&B manager;
Type of business: restaurant, hotel, restaurant chain, food production.

Why do we segment?

The most important reason to segment our audience is to tailor our message to the right person and type of business so that it resonates better with them.

Based on customer longevity

I believe you can’t take a set-it-and-forget-it approach to customer segmentation. Your users will evolve so you must revisit your segmentation strategy periodically and look for shifts in size, behavior, and engagement.

We usually have three customer segments:

Those who have just heard about our services or inquired about us;
Those who are just starting with us;
Those who are our regular customers.

Bottom Line?

Segmenting your customers can help you personalize your marketing strategies.

Based on income, level of education, and work/life schedule

We use three different criteria to segment our customers effectively. These are

Income (this helps us when it comes to pricing the packages we offer);
Level of education (more specifically, financial education);
Work/life schedule.

By segmenting our customers in this manner, we can craft different marketing techniques that are most effective for each group. This resulted in better product differentiation and more valuable products that serve each customer’s individual learning needs, as well as effective marketing that results in higher conversions.

Based on affluence and perceived wealth

We split our customers up into age and location to segment them in terms of affluence and perceived wealth. This allowed us to target our higher-earning customers with higher rates of investment options as well as property-based schemes.

We used different low-level incentives for lower-income customers so as not to offer them things that they cannot afford or would be a financial stretch for them.

Our average engagement and response rate was around 7% before customer segmentation.

Afterward, they rose significantly in each sector. Higher earning segmentation rose to 13%, almost doubling, whereas the lower-earning customers rose to 10%. Effectively, raising our turnover by 11% YOY.

Based on the number of places a person visited, distance, and vacation budget

We segment our customers based on the number of places and the average distance they have traveled, as well as how much they typically spend on vacation.

By categorizing our customers in this way we have been able to laser-target them with promotions that apply to them: those relevant to their budget and preferred destinations.

By only sending applicable vacations and deals we have increased the open rates on our sales emails massively even if the click-through rate and conversion have stayed constant. This means we get a piece of a bigger revenue pie, with our revenue up from tours and vacations by 25% so far this season.

Based on brands, product categories, and spending patterns

We segment our customers in several ways both online and brick and mortar.

We segment our customers by

Which brands do they buy;
Which products do they buy;
Which categories of products do they buy;
How much they spend or how frequently they buy.

Loyal customers or repeat customers tend to get premium deals that we don’t offer to everyone. When we run specials or sales we market them to people who have bought that specific product, that brand, and a product in that category and target the messages based on that.

The open rates, as well as the revenue driven by an email to a targeted customer group versus just our main list, are much more powerful.

We’re looking at an open rate from 20% to 40% as opposed to 6% to 8%. We’re looking at an email that will bring in $3,000 in sales versus $400 in sales.

Even though that targeted list is substantially smaller, it will bring in much more revenue.

Based on the customers’ gender

Like many companies, we divide our emails into a variety of segments. One of the best-performing customer segments is based on the gender of the buyer. While we don’t ask this of our customers, our 3rd party email provider has an AI for this.

Being in the jewelry industry, sometimes women buy for themselves, and other times it is their significant other.

What we implemented was the segmentation of gender for all our follow-up emails. If someone purchases a ring, they get a follow-up of a necklace, If they purchase a necklace, they get a follow-up with a pair of earrings.

Based on the sales cycle and product type

One segment we have is anyone who has bought a product from us in 120 days and been active on the site in the last 30 days., This usually gives us a great open rate because it’s the most recent people we are sending to instead of someone that bought from us 6 years ago and never opened an email.

Another segment we have is certain products. So if we have a fat burner segment, it would look something like anyone who has bought a fat burner in the last 120 days and is not suppressed.

We do this a lot with certain products and or collections so we can focus more on those customers with certain deals.

You can apply different rule sets to segment the customers based on certain criteria. Jacktrade provides a very flexible and user-friendly interface to set up your segment criteria using tokens – for example, customer status, quote status, price range, products, services, etc.

Based on the industry

We segment our customers based on the industry they are in. Because we provide transcription services for the legal, law enforcement, medical, academic, financial, and general business industries it is important that our marketing materials and salespeople know the differences in each.

The medical industry is very different from the legal industry and they use very different lingo so knowing the difference is how we can serve all those different niche markets. We also have separate teams that work with different niches as well, and that’s what’s also allowed us to be successful in a handful of totally different markets.

Based on the platforms/technology that customers use

Our product – a customer engagement solution boosted with chatbots – is platform-based, so we segment our users by platforms and technologies they use or don’t use.

Shopify users and WordPress users are our two most prominent customer segments. Everything we do – from marketing to retention and referral stages – reflects this division.

For instance, we create blog content that attracts users of the two separate platforms. “Live Chat & Chatbots for Shopify” and “10 Best WordPress Chat Plugins” are two articles with the best conversion rate in the history of Tidio Blog – 49.4%(!) and 33.8%, respectively. It means that every second Shopify user and every third WordPress user looking for a live chat solution who stumbles across the post creates an account. After that, they receive separate onboarding emails and different tours.

Based on the product features that customers use

This may be a bit unusual, but we segment our customers based on which feature they use the most in our app. We have several different offers when it comes to social proof tools and usually, customers don’t end up using all of them.

For example, some rely heavily on reviews, while others use conversion notifications.

We send email newsletters to our customers all the time, but it’s no use sending an email about a feature that the customer doesn’t use. So, we send different emails based on the feature that the customer uses predominantly. If they use reviews extensively, we send them emails on how to collect better reviews, where to display them, how to maximize their conversion rates through reviews, etc.

Implied segmentation is segmentation based on characteristics that are implied in their actions, behavior, and purchase behavior.

Examples:

Customers who bought a pair of men’s shoes are likely men or buying for men.
Customers who viewed your business’ pricing page twice in a single day but haven’t yet bought are likely interested in buying and shopping around.
Customers who downloaded your guide to filing property taxes likely own property.