Whether you’re a large-scale business or a small business, since the advent of CRM, your industry is constantly evolving—and quite frankly, so is your customer base. As your reach expands and you serve a wider audience, the diversity of individuals you encounter also grows. Marketing to each of these distinct groups requires a tailored approach, as a one-size-fits-all strategy often falls short of delivering optimal results.
Businesses that make the most progress are those that take the time to study their customer base and craft their offerings to meet each demographic.
The major aspect of CRM is the process of studying and grouping categories of customers – Customer Segmentation. This involves analyzing customer attributes and forming groups based on their behaviors, demographics, and specific characteristics.
This approach enables businesses to deliver targeted messaging, moving away from a generic strategy and driving more effective business outcomes. One notable example is how companies strategically run targeted campaigns for women on International Women’s Day. Instead of sending a blanket email to all customers, they ensure that promotional offers specifically reach women through personalized email marketing. This approach allows companies to tailor their communications accordingly, providing maximum value to their customers.
There are several factors that determine how a business can decide what customer segments to choose
Factors That Affect CRM Include;
- Industry data: You want to ask, how is the industry meeting the demands and preferences of consumers? Who are the major players in the industry and how are they segmenting customers in their campaigns? What lessons can be learned from industry and market research to improve current and future customer segmentation approaches?
- Your customer base: What are the patterns you can observe from your current customer base?
For B2C (business to customers), information gathered such as age, location, marital status, and income are useful attributes to determine consumers’ behavior.
For B2B (business to business) customers, the focus is on details like company revenue, industry sector, job titles, products or services offered, and the technologies they utilize.
- Collect customer experience data: What’s the feedback so far? How have people responded emotionally, intellectually, and behaviorally to the business? Collect quantitative data to track notable, measurable trends such as customers’ purchase history, and how they respond to email campaigns and social media changes amongst others.
Here are some examples of how businesses can segment data.
- Demographic Segmentation: Demographic segmentation categorizes customers based on factual aspects of their lives. This can include gender, age, occupation, household income, and marital status.
- Geographic Segmentation: Geographic segmentation divides customers based on their location or region and may also consider location specifics, preferred language, and cultural influences.
- Behavioral Segmentation: Behavioural segmentation groups your audience based on their online actions, including past purchases, frequency of purchases, and preferences for certain products.
- Psychographic Segmentation: Psychographic segmentation entails categorizing your audience based on their attitudes, values, lifestyles, and interests.
- Technographic Segmentation: Technographic segmentation involves grouping customers based on their technology usage, including the apps they use, how they discover your brand online, and their preferred devices and channels for engagement.
- Needs-based Segmentation: Need-based segmentation involves grouping individuals based on their shared needs. By identifying these common needs, businesses gain insights into why customers make specific buying decisions related to those needs.
- Value-based Segmentation: Value-based segmentation involves evaluating groups of customers based on the revenue they generate and the costs associated with establishing and maintaining relationships with them. This approach helps businesses prioritize customers based on their overall value to the company, considering both their contribution to revenue and the expenses incurred in serving them.
Customer segmentation may sound like a tedious process, but in reality, it is done by using different types of software systems including a Customer Relationship Management system or CRM and Marketing Cloud Systems. As the name suggests, CRM systems enable businesses to effectively manage their customers, ensuring the delivery of personalized value across all touchpoints. It helps you to see your customer as an individual human being and not a collective group of people, it also allows you to nurture these relationships at whatever stage they’re in.
These personalized offerings help companies drive profitability and expand to new markets organically. Companies such as Intense Digital know how to leverage third-party technologies to help businesses meet their decided goals. Customer segmentation powered by CRM tools is a game-changer in modern marketing strategies. Once businesses can understand the unique needs, preferences, and behaviors of different customer segments, they can tailor their offerings, communications, and experiences to deliver maximum value and foster long-lasting customer relationships.
