Even the most brilliant marketing campaign can fail – if it is delivered to the wrong audience. In marketing, the more precisely you can define your audience, the more accurately you can predict whether that audience contains your best prospects – and the more quickly you can use that knowledge to find and convert more customers. And one key tool that helps you do that is segmentation.
Simply put, segmentation is the process of grouping households with similar behaviors, wants and needs to achieve higher marketing efficiencies. Segmentation indicates WHO your best customers and prospects are. It uncovers WHAT your best customers are like – what they buy, what their attitudes are toward a category and what their current lifestyle behaviors are. By truly understanding your customers, you can deliver the right message to the right consumers via the right channel, helping you reduce costs and improve response rates.
Using segmentation (from the right data partner), you can also create an ideal prospect list using pre-built syndicated audiences containing tens of thousands of consumer behaviors and demographic datasets covering key categories like shopping, financial and technology preferences, online and offline media habits, multicultural affinity and more. This allows you to better target your messages and achieve better sales results.
In fact, segmentation can help you improve the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing campaigns in six key ways, including:
- Segmentation lets you identify and reach more of your best prospects. Using segmentation, you can determine who your best customers are – and easily create a scaled marketing campaign by developing a list of hundreds or thousands of “lookalike” prospects who are similar to your most profitable current customers. When Alltru Credit Union launched an auto loan campaign, it used Claritas segmentation tools to identify the organization’s ideal member prospects – and used that data to create a campaign that increased new visitor traffic to the auto loan webpage by 623% and achieved 100 conversions in 3 months.[i] And the Seattle Times helped one of its donor-based clients leverage Claritas syndicated audience data to launch a banner ad campaign designed to increase the number of donors who gave $100,000 or more to the organization. The result? The organization grew its revenue more than $8 million by converting 81 new $100,000+ donors – an increase of 10%.[ii]
- It lets you build a campaign using a customized message that appeals to your target audiences. The best way to create a campaign that appeals to your ideal customer is knowing what makes them tick. Segmentation allows you to truly understand your best customers – including what they do in their free time, how much money they make, where they shop and even whether discounts are important to them. Take IndyCar as an example. When the racing organization came to Claritas with the goal of increasing TV viewership, Claritas helped IndyCar use lifestyle segmentation to create a campaign that targeted IndyCar’s four best prospect groups based on their behaviors and interests. As a result, IndyCar increased its TV viewership by 24% – and achieved its highest viewership ever.[iii]
- It also lets you determine the right channels to reach those prospects. Segmentation can help you figure out HOW best to reach your audiences as well. Claritas’s 8,000 Syndicated Audiences – which cover more than 120 million households – are built using over 10,000 demographic and behavioral attributes. These include what websites these audiences are visiting, which TV shows they’re watching, their most-used email address, what social media channels they prefer and much more. For instance, Claritas can tell you if your targeted audience spends a lot of time researching crafts on Pinterest versus finding Facebook friends – or spends even more time watching Netflix. Or if you’re launching a social media-based multicultural campaign, Claritas data will tell you that LinkedIn is popular with many Asian segments but not with most Hispanic segments.[iv]
- It helps you target new customers based on multicultural makeup, geographic location and many other factors. Today’s marketers are searching for new ways to target multicultural consumers, a growing customer base with rising spending power. For instance, Claritas’s 2020 Hispanic Market Report shows that U.S. Hispanics alone represent an aggregate household spending power of nearly $1 trillion annually. Claritas has the largest multicultural database available today, which allows companies to precisely target a wide variety of multicultural customers. In fact, when a large media company needed to help its telecom client reach bi-cultural Asian consumers, it used Claritas CultureCode® data – which provides insights into more than 130 million segmented multicultural consumers by acculturation, country of origin, preferred language, lifestyle preference and more – to better understand this specific audience. The strategy improved engagements more than 4X and produced click rates more than three times the industry average. [v] A similar strategy can be used to target customer groups by location, gender, likelihood to buy and much more.
- Segmentation helps your campaigns remain privacy compliant. A good segmentation strategy leverages syndicated audience data that is based on aggregated or modeled information and thus contains no personal identifiable information (PII) used or transmitted. At Claritas, we build our models in a privacy safe way to ensure compliance with regulations including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) A segment is modeled as a predictor or likelihood scores are applied based on consumer behavior or relevant consumer data attributes. The Claritas Identity Graph then allows you to quickly onboard syndicated segments to channel platforms in a privacy-compliant manner, allowing you to quickly execute multichannel marketing campaigns without sacrificing quality or scale.
- Segmentation can even help you make better business decisions. If you’re launching a new product, segmentation can help determine which areas of the country might have the most demand so you can build your distribution strategy accordingly. Segmentation can also help you determine if a potential new product might fail. When the electric cooperative Cobb EMC turned to Claritas to find out why members weren’t buying into its solar panel program, it found that its customer base simply wasn’t interested in solar energy – but did have a high interest in electronic vehicles (EVs). So the company switched gears and launched an EV campaign. The resulting campaign had email open rates as high as 56% and increased website visitors by 300 daily.[vi]
Segmentation helps you deliver the right message via the right channel to the right customer, which in turn helps you reduce customer acquisition costs, increase conversions and significantly boost your marketing ROI. If you want to gain a better understanding of your best customers – or if you already know what your best customers look like and want to attract new ones – segmentation can help.
To learn more about how you can use segmentation to increase your marketing ROI, listen to one of our industry podcasts, Using Segmentation To Win The Privacy Debate, or contact at findcustomers@claritas.com.
For more information on Claritas visit www.claritas.com.
[i] Alltru Credit Union Achieves An Average 123% Return On Monthly Retail Loan Goals | Claritas LLC Case Study
[ii] From Steve Fuller (Seattle Times) portion of the Why Behind the Buy Episode 14, Using Segmentation to Win the Privacy Debate
[iii] Indy Car Revs Up TV Viewership with Digital | Claritas LLC Case Study
[iv] Based on info in the Hispanic study.
[v] Pulled from “Multicultural Telecom” summary in the Case Study summaries PowerPoint
[vi] Cobb EMC Electrifies The Drive For Their Members | Claritas LLC Case Study