Higher customer retention rates come from better customer support, and the modern consumer is all about personalization. This is true of companies that perform outreach at scale, so don’t think that your audience will take your size as an excuse. No one cares how big you are; they care about one thing – their feelings!
You can more easily keep key aspects of your analytics and speak more directly to your customers through the proper segmentation of your audience. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices here.
Narrowing Down the Data
The days of haphazardly collecting big data and expecting it to deliver actionable insights are over. It is much more effective to limit the type of data that you prioritize, although you can and should definitely continue to collect as much data as you can. You never know when something might become useful in the future.
Narrowing down data means that you identify your key performance indicators and determine the factors that most affect those indicators. If you have a flexible user interface, you can set up your dashboard to configure views and perspectives of your data that directly address these requirements.
Having an Omnichannel Perspective
This might seem counterintuitive considering the tip directly above. Although you should prioritize your data, you should also endeavor to gather that data from multiple channels. If you have an omnichannel approach, you will have a fuller set of data and a much more accurate perspective of your customers and prospects.
Additionally, you can further prioritize your data through the filters of the channels that you use to gather the data. For instance, if your Facebook social media stream tends to attract less qualified prospects, you can direct your efforts away from the type of person that comes through that channel. The data they create should also become less important to your marketing efforts as well.
In this way, you can identify the segments of your customer base that are most deserving of your personalized attention.
Creating Segmented Buyer Profiles
This technique is not one that is ever meant to be completed, and that is a good thing. Your company should be built on a philosophy of continuous improvement anyway; this is just a play off of that strategic infrastructure.
Basically, building your buyer profiles will never stop. As you collect information from new customers at checkout, from prospects at surveys and opinion polls, from comment threads of social media and from trusted third parties, you will consistently organize this information into gradually more precise buyer profiles.
Stacking this data in an organized way will allow you to draw a more complete picture of the customers that you already have. More importantly, it will allow you to more quickly segment the prospects that you gain in the future. Again, you will learn how to stack this data based on the prioritization of your key performance indicators (KPIs) within each channel.
Redesigning Your Information Requests
If you have the foresight to redesign your information grabs based upon your key performance indicators, you will be able to clean much more important information off the top. Gathering the information that is most important to you at first is very important, as prospects tend to become less precise about their answers the farther down they go into a survey.
You should also make sure that you store all of the data from your omnichannel sources in a single database. This way, you do not miss out on data that is important to your buyer profiles. You should not allow the design of your infrastructure to determine the kind of information that you collect or the way in which you prioritize that information.
As a matter of fact, your infrastructure should change based on the information and prioritization structure that you set and tweak over time.
Capturing Data at Multiple Touchpoints
Prospects will likely feel differently about your products and brand at different points in the sales funnel. This kind of data, which allows you to incorporate the very important time aspect into your collection efforts, will also help you segment and prioritize your customers as well.
As you gain data from different points in your sales funnel, you can begin to differentiate between the type of customer at the beginning of the funnel and those who make it through the end. Depending on the importance of the customer type at the beginning of your funnel, you can then make the decision of whether to change your marketing tactics or focus more directly on the consumer type who seems to stick with your brand throughout your marketing process.
Always Analyze
Do not make the mistake of ever thinking that you are finished with your segmentation process. The market that you are aiming for will change with new competition and new disruptive technologies in your industry. The only way that you will be able to keep up with these changes is to always analyze your results.
There is no reason to ever go with your gut feeling when you have so much data to go by. Make sure that you are looking straight into the insights that your data is giving you.
Rest assured that your prospects are not going to follow a nice, clean customer journey straight from the mouth of your sales funnel right into your conversion tunnel. You need the ability to be flexible, and proper customer segmentation is a great first step. Follow the tips above so that your reps can provide that first name service that we all love.
