Segmentation strategy
Why is a segmentation strategy important?
To explain this, I would like to quote Avinash Kaushik:
Analyzing
data in aggregate is a crime. Bold statement, but the
reality is that a monolith does not come to your website. Your site
does not exist for a singular reason either. The core drivers of
traffic are magnificently different for each core group of
visitors.So your website’s really a mix of Visitor Sources, Visitor Behavior and your Desired Outcomes.
When you look at all that in aggregate you get nothing. You think Average Time on Site means something. No! You think All Visits and Overall Conversion Rate gives you insights. Nyet! You think understanding Keywords without drilling down to each search engine will be awesome. Non!
If you want to find actionable insights you need to segment your web analytics data. You need to separate out the various Sources, Behavior and Outcomes.
Then you’ll understand behavior of micro-segments of your website visitors, which in turn will lead you to actionable insights because you are not focusing on a glob rather you are focused on a specific."
Types of segmentation strategies
Traditional marketing highlights four main types of segmentation stragies:
- Behavioral: segmentation based on based on target user's knowledge, attitude, uses, and/or responses to a product or brand;
- Demographic: segmentation based on demographic characteristics such as age, gender, marital status, religion, ethinic origin and education level;
- Geographic: segmentation based on where the target user lives and/or works;
- Psychographic: segmentation based on characteristics such as social class, lifestyle and personality type.
Other types of segmentation include:
- Attitudinal: segmentation based on what the target users thing - understanding what makes them tick (often used to develop personas);
- Customer life-cycle: segmentation based on purchasing life-cycle stage;
- Firmographic: segmentation refers to characteristics of an organization which include employee size, revenue size, industry, number of locations and location of headquarters.
- Technographic: segmentation based on ownership, use patterns and attitudes toward information, communication and entertainment technologies.
Web oriented segmentation strategies
When defining a segmentation strategy for website users, besides the traditional groups of users, web interaction triggers can be used to slice users. These triggers include:
- referring sites: domains that bring users to your site;
- visitor type: differentiating users based on number of times they visited your site (ex: new vs returning);
- tech characteristics: information about the user browser or operating system (type or version).
Getting started
To start using segmentation in your web presence, we recommend the following steps:
- Understand customers's needs and preferences;
- Group customers in segments;
- Target segment that meets needs and preferences;
- Measure targeting results and compare to site average and other segments;
- Adapt and optimize (create new segments, change current, segment size).
A segmentation strategy can be evolved to create a sustainable competitive advantage for your company's website. We suggest to start small (creating 2 to 5 segments) and then work on this.
More information
To learn more about segmentation strategies and how to use these on the web, we recommend the following resources:
Please leave your comments and links!
Comment
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Comment by Lenwood on December 8, 2010 at 10:49pm -
This is good stuff. Are you saying that it's possible to do each of these types of segmenting with BTBuckets? If so, can you point to howto's or at least tips on how to achieve this?
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