The performance of a marketing campaign depends heavily on the astuteness and relevance of the targeting. To target your operations, it is necessary to segment your customer database. An efficient segmentation makes it possible to better know its customers and is therefore part of a customer knowledge process. Here is a summary of the main...
The performance of a marketing campaign depends heavily on the astuteness and relevance of the targeting. To target your operations, it is necessary to segment your customer database. An efficient segmentation makes it possible to better know its customers and is therefore part of a customer knowledge process. Here is a summary of the main existing segmentation criteria.
What is customer segmentation in marketing?
Not all your customers will have the same tastes, the same needs, the same desires, the same behaviours. To be relevant, a commercial offer must match the target as much as possible.
In other words, for the ROI of a marketing operation to be there, the people you target should be interested in the product or service you offer.
But to target a marketing campaign, it is essential to know your customers well, and for that to segment your customer database. Segmentation consists of categorising your customers according to different criteria and creating different groups of homogeneous customers within your CRM. The greater the number of criteria considered, the more the targeting can be refined.
For example: target men 30 to 35 years old, interested in swimming and having purchased on your site in the past two months.
Targeting makes it possible to propose the most suitable offers to its customers and implies a finely tuned segmentation of its customers.
1. Socio-demographic criteria for customer segmentation
This type of criteria, despite its somewhat barbaric name, is actually the simplest and most obvious.
It is a question of classifying the clients according to their social status, their age, their gender, etc. Socio-demographic criteria are the most important because they are usually the most relevant.
Furthermore, this data is generally the easiest to collect. The famous targeting of the “housewife under 50” is based on these socio-demographic criteria.
To be more precise, we can distinguish three types of socio-demographic criteria:
- Socio-economic criteria: occupation, socio-professional category (SPC), income level.
- Demographic criteria: age, sex, marital status, conjugal status (single or couple), level of education, height and weight.
- Geographical criteria: place of residence, place of work…
2. Psychological criteria segmentation
We are no longer interested in what customers are (their age, gender, etc.) but their personality. The term personality is very broad and overlaps, for example:
- Lifestyle
- Activities
- Hobbies and centres of interest
- Opinions
It is generally harder to obtain this kind of information, but it is often very relevant from a marketing perspective.
If you want to promote skis for example, it is better to target customers/prospects interested in winter sports.
Psychological criteria, contrary to socio-demographic criteria, are subjective and allow knowledge or conjecture of what customers like.
3. Behavioural criteria segmentation
These criteria are finer, less general than the psychological criteria. Their use allows you to significantly refine the targeting of your marketing operations.
Behavioural criteria can be linked to:
- the purchase situation: does the customer buy occasionally or frequently?
- the benefits that the customer seeks through his purchases: save money, buy quality products, beauty products, comfort, etc. We identify here what customers value.
- the degree of customer loyalty. We do not target a loyal customer and a new customer in the same way.
- the purchasing behaviour: means of payment used, preferred delivery method, preferred time slots for purchase (weekdays, weekends, mornings, evenings, etc.), channel used (computer, mobile, physical point of sale).
- the use made by customers of purchased products.
Cross segmentations to target your customers better!
As we have already mentioned, the more targeted a marketing operation is, the more important it will be. Good targeting involves combining several criteria.
In general, purely socio-demographic criteria are not enough, they must be accompanied by psychological or behavioural criteria. On the other hand, these last two types of criteria must be combined with socio-demographic criteria.
The more customer data you can collect, the more criteria and segmentation you can define in your customer base.
The problem that then arises is the following: how to collect all these data? Remember, demographics are the easiest to retrieve. They can be requested when registering for a newsletter, a contest or an online purchase.
But more subjective data, related to behaviour or tastes, are more difficult to obtain. The best way to collect this kind of data is to use “smart” customer questionnaires:
They will allow you to address the right people at the right time to get an optimal response rate.
Now it’s time for you to know a bit more about your customers!
