How do you keep customers loyal with segmentation?

Segmentation is the invitation to the party. Engaging the consumer to Identify with the Brand ‘Emotionale’, is dancing with them.

Segmentation is largely misused and leads to excessively narrow targets which restrict business growth. It’s been proven - across sectors - that the #1 source of business growth is attracting MORE customers, and loyalty just follows brand size. We need to use ‘segments’ to ensure we reach all potential customers (sources of growth) over short, med and long-term. Use segments to maximise reach across a wide potential customer base.

I find this topic fascinating... In life, we all sell and buy, it just depends on what role we play at a given moment. So how do we position our behaviors, preferences and values to be properly segmented and to achieve more appropriate and personalized rewards, incentives and communication for ourselves and our businesses…(open to discussion...)

In a world where customers have endless choices, building and maintaining their loyalty is a strategic imperative. Customer segmentation empowers businesses to tailor their approach, fostering deeper connections and loyalty among diverse customer groups. By consistently delivering personalized experiences, targeted communication, and customized offerings, companies can thrive in today's competitive marketplace. Remember, customer loyalty is not a one-time achievement; it's an ongoing commitment. Embrace segmentation as a powerful tool to continuously engage, satisfy, and retain your customers, ultimately driving long-term success for your business.

Customer segmentation starts by analyzing your customer data to identify different segments - maybe you have first-time buyers or frequent shoppers. Perhaps those groups are quite different in age or where they live. Once you have that figured out, you can personalize your marketing campaigns and create targeted offers and promotions. Nothing is one-size-fits-all so this is the way to know your audience and what they will respond to.

You need to understand your market in order to cater for them. It's not just the demographics that matter, you need to know how they function and how they think.

Segmentation is important and helpful because it allows us as a brand to optimize and, to a degree, personalize our communication. Not all communications are for all customers, but they are for specific segments of the overall audience. That helps us build a more relevant and personal relationship.

Customers are loyal when they are fully satisfied. When their journey is smooth and hassle-free. This can be achieved by knowing them thoroughly and never giving them a chance to switch to competitors for any reason. As mentioned, market segmentation can help identify and cater to customers with the best possible strategy throughout the journey.

The sharper the segmenting, you are able to gain deeper understanding on how and why people may use your product. The knowledge of knowing what motivates a certain group of people to buy your product helps to find similar lookalike people and mostly important to build loyalty segmentation acts an tool to develop relationships with audiences with the right messaging on the right and relevant tools for the selected audiences

It always helps you or your brand if you know what set of people "May", "Will", or "Surely" buy. The more you know about your customer, you can think like them and come out with the right kind of products, when to pitch more when to not pitch, how to pitch them. It's like if you know your girlfriend/wife, you know when to speak and when not to speak, just on a lighter note. Hence, segmenting your customers helps you understand the set in a very detailed manner. If you can connect with them emotionally, you will be able to make them buy from you only. Keep working on the same. It's not a one time thing, you need to continuously keep evaluating..

I disagree with the belief that customer segmentation is the way to lead to customer loyalty. If you need to segment your customers you obviously have not yet identified the obvious universal truth on which your brand is based. Your brand's emotionale. Try answering the question "What business is your brand really in?" If your answer is a product or a service, why you don't even have a brand! And if you need to keep customers by appealing to each "market segment", why you've got a schizophrenic brand. One that means different things to different people.

Embrace a feedback-driven approach by actively seeking input from loyal customers within different segments. This keeps everyone involved.

Nowadays, we have two general branches of segmentation if we speak about Retail: 1. Classic marketing approach with a few ICPs 2. Data-based segmentation for hundreds and thousands of segments for automatic personalization tools like Dynamic Yelds. The first is suitable for offline shops and general brand awareness and tone of voice. The second is excellent for full automatization if the Retailer has enough consistent data. Combining the two approaches, we get a 1+1=3 result.

During the market segmentation process you need to acces the data and sources of validation it. As the data is relevant as of date, should align with the objectives.

There are many ways to segmentation customers, but one of the best segmentation method is RFM strategy. With RFM you have 3 important data from customer and combine the types of them and make many segmentation.

In its essence, customer segmentation helps you build customer loyalty because you're segmenting customers and accordingly tailoring contents, ads, and even rewards for those customers. Depending on the type of loyalty program you're using, segmentation helps you offer customers value.

Market Segments when compared to your actual customers help understand which segment is under or over developed. And can help tweak your value proposition to serve specific segments

When customers feel understood and valued, they are more likely to remain loyal. Use segmentation to target specific customer segments for feedback and surveys. This allows you to gain insights into their preferences, pain points, and expectations, and shows that you value their opinions.

By segmenting the audience you are not only understanding them. but you're able to tailor marketing to them so they are more likely to see it, and feel your company may be understanding their feelings, needs and wants

You can target promotions and product offerings to customers and create additional trips to the store. In the end customers could buy more!

You still need to continuously refine your segmentation moving forward. This helps you stay ahead of the curve and boosts your growth.

Relying 100% on automated solutions. We are blessed with thousands of tools that can help us identify different audience groups and even map out behaviors. But as marketers it's is very important to take time and understand these audience groups, looking at their lifestyles, contexts and cultures. Sometimes you see a dip in number and panic, but in truth it might be the audience is bored or looking for something new. Therefore it is vital to remember that there is so much know than numbers to comprehend about audience groups before jumping into conclusions or planing the next marketing campaign.

You need to track the segmentation trends and changes on a regular basis, at least monthly and weekly during promotions. It does create more work for the analytic teams. Also, companies need to react quickly to shifting market trends.

Market segmentation can also pose some challenges for customer loyalty, such as choosing the right criteria and data that reflect customers' characteristics and behavior, as customers may have multiple and changing needs and preferences. For example, a business might segment its customers into groups of loyal customers, those who are at risk of defecting, and those who are already defected.

Availability of quality data and integration of customer data that is spread across (often siloed) different parts of the organization - getting to single source of truth

Evolving the customer base with giving them more brownie points which can eventually be more fruitful can lead to more powerful segmentation.

While market segmentation is a good starting point, it should serve merely as a springboard toward the ultimate goal: establishing high-touch relationships that stand the test of time. Because in a world of endless choices, a meaningful relationship can be the most compelling differentiator.

If your strategy for growth is customer loyalty then you may want to rethink your strategy. All the evidence from the likes of Ehrenberg-Bass clearly shows that to grow, you should increase penetration with light category buyers. You do this through sophisticated mass marketing to increase mental and physical availability (read Byron Sharp How Brands Grow) with a mix of broad-reach/long-term brand building and narrower shorter term activations (read Binet and Field)