Why You Should Use Personalization and Segmentation in Your Marketing Strategy
The holidays are here. That means it’s time to ramp up your marketing efforts to take advantage of this time of year.
Content creation is essential. But how you deliver that content ultimately will decide what kind you should create.
Two types of marketing strategies come into play here: Personalization and Segmentation.
Though they may seem similar and often get confused by many marketers, personalization and segmentation are, in fact, very different.
Here is the difference between the two and why you should use both of them in your marketing efforts this holiday season.
Personalization is about individuality
Making the shopping experience as personal as possible by marketing toward individual tastes and experiences is what personalization is all about.
Imagine going into your favorite clothing store. If you’re a regular there, most likely, the sales clerk knows you by your first name, has learned your style, and works with you regularly to find the product you’re looking for.
In digital marketing, the equivalent of this is customizing your messaging to individuals to reflect their likes and dislikes and recommend products or services based on past purchases.
Segmentation is about dividing and conquering
While personalization is about marketing toward the individual, segmentation is about dividing your audience into groups according to attributes such as age, geography, gender, and more, and sending ads and messaging that reflect those shared characteristics.
For example, we’ll stick with your favorite brick-and-mortar store. When you walk in, you don’t see the men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing all piled together in the same section. The store categorizes each section according to gender and children. And within those sections, it’s further segmented by size. This is what segmentation is all about.
While both are useful tools on their own, using them together will most certainly boost your holiday sales.
Here’s how to do it.
Segment your customers to see which ones are driving the most growth
As we stated earlier, segmentation is about grouping your customers with common characteristics.
Some other customer segments are:
- People who have purchased from you in the last 60 days
- Subscribers to your email list who’ve never bought anything
- Customers who have purchased an item from a particular collection in the previous year
There are a lot of possibilities when segmenting your audience. Keep in mind, though, that when creating them, the goal is to find out which ones will help drive more growth for your business. And, as the wise Jedi Master Yoda once said, “Size matters not.” Even if the segmented group is small, if it’s driving a significant part of your business, you’ll want to first focus your marketing efforts on that group rather than a larger group that is driving only a fraction of your sales.
