What Is Contact Segmentation?
Contact segmentation is the practice of breaking your contacts into segments based on their similarities in order to more effectively market to them. This is commonly used by startups as a way to identify and focus resources on their hottest markets, but its usefulness extends well beyond that.
Contact segmentation allows businesses of any size to develop marketing content and strategies that target each group individually for a more nuanced, customer-centric approach.
How Does Contact Segmentation Work?
Contact segmentation is based on several market segmentation types. These market segments are what you should use to determine how to group your contacts into smaller sets. Of the market segments, the big hitters are demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic.
Yieldify breaks down the four main contact segmentation types. Let’s talk about what they all mean.
Demographic Segmentation
Demographic segmentation looks at the core components of what makes a person who they are. Where are they from? What’s their ethnicity? What industry are they involved in? You should also consider their gender, education level, annual income, age, or any other factor that can have larger cultural impacts on a person’s identity.
Demographic information often serves as the foundation for a person’s entire lifestyle, so accounting for demographic differences in your contacts and segmenting accordingly is crucial.
Psychographic Segmentation
Psychographic segmentation goes beyond the “who” and analyzes the “why.” Why do people do the things they do? Examining a person’s motivators such as their values, belief systems, goals, and personality traits helps to uncover why a person makes certain decisions or behaves a certain way. This information feeds into the next market segment: behavioral.
Behavioral Segmentation
Behavioral segmentation is the manifestation of psychographic segmentation.
With a psychographic profile, we can understand why people do as they do. Their behavioral profile is what that really looks like. How do they spend money? What are their financial priorities? You can also look at their interactions with your business. How often they visit your website, how engaged they are in social media, and what type of ads they’ve responded to in the past are all pieces of information you can use to segment contacts based on behavior.
Geographic Segmentation
The last big market segment is geographic, which is fairly straightforward. Where does this person live or work? You can choose to segment contacts by larger geographic locations such as state or region, or you can segment contacts into smaller groups by looking at cities or postal codes.
How you segment contacts geographically should depend on what you are trying to achieve.
If you are wanting to advertise a live event for example, you should segment by smaller geographic areas so you can focus your efforts on reaching contacts who are within a short distance of the event venue. However, a company like NorthFace may want to segment by larger geographic areas so they can advertise heavy-duty coats to colder climates and light-weight activewear to warm climates.
What is the goal of contact segmentation?
The ultimate goal of contact segmentation is to take information from all market segments and divide contacts into groups that allow you to target your audiences more effectively.
When you’re marketing to homogeneous populations, you can address their specific needs easier, faster, and without wasting resources.
How Do You Turn Your Contacts’ Market Information Into Easily Targetable Segments?
As with most things, there’s a hard way and an easy. The hard way is to analyze the market information manually and try to identify trends across contacts in order to group them.
Anything done manually is going to be more time consuming and have a wider margin of error than automated processes, especially contact segmentation. Just the process of gathering the information itself is going to be a challenge without a customer relationship management (CRM) software. And that brings us to the easy way: using a CRM.
CRM software captures and stores all your prospective clients’ data for you, making it a no-brainer if you want customer data at your fingertips without spending hours of time manually looking up information. More than that, it can identify data patterns that may be overlooked by even the most analytical minds. There’s no guesswork, no questioning your abilities, and no time wasted on gathering and examining data that could have been captured automatically.
Because contact segmentation is much more precise when done with the help of CRM, businesses can connect to potential clients on a personal level that’s difficult to achieve otherwise. This increases engagement, sales, and brand loyalty.
Why Should You Trust Carefully Crafted to Segment Your Contacts?
Contact segmentation can take your marketing to the next level, but only if it’s done well.
Don’t agonize for hours while you manually sift through customer data for patterns and trends, all while wondering if the results will be accurate and worthwhile.
We believe in automating as much as possible to minimize human error and get the best results available.
We have access to tools and technology you may not have on your own. Choosing Carefully Crafted lets you take advantage of all our resources and expert advice so you don’t have to do it alone.
