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10 Best Customer Segmentation Strategies For E-Commerce

Email segmentation is a feature offered by the vast majority of the big email autoresponder services out there such as GetResponse, AWeber, etc.

Segmenting your emails is just one way for you to keep giving long-term value to your customers and therefore increase your profits.

I’m going to give you the 10 best ways to segment customers for e-commerce so you can do just that.

Why Segment Customers?

Email segmentation is when you group together specific people from your email list/lists based on specific criteria that you choose from your customer data analysis.

For example, let’s say you own an online music store, I have been a repeat customer of your store and have bought several Rolling Stones CDs from you.

When the Rolling Stones announce they are releasing a new album, you can send an email to me and everyone else in your customer base who has previously purchased Rolling Stones CDs from you. As we’d be the most likely to buy it, why wouldn’t you?

You can specify practically any customer criteria you can think of for your customer segmentation strategy.

10 Best Ways To Segment Customers For E-Commerce

Sure, there are way more than 10 ways to segment your customers, but why complicate things unnecessarily?

It can be daunting when you start segmenting customers, but it’s nothing to worry about.

These 10 simple ways to segment your customers are a perfect place to start.

1: Demographics

People standing in a caircle

Demographics are set things that you can use to narrow down your target audience.

These include practically anything and everything including:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Location
  • Household income
  • Personal interests

Demographic segmentation is a great way to save you time and effort.

Let’s say you run a shoe store and you have a new line of ladies shoes in stock, you can target just your female customers. You could even narrow it down to their shoe size or favorite shoe brand if you needed to.

The more information you have, the better you can target your desired audience. To get this data, you could request some basic information when your customer signs up to you and then occasionally request them to fill in short surveys.

But, be careful of asking for too much information at one time as this can put people off filling out the survey forms.

2: Survey & Quiz Results

online survey

As stated above, the more customer data you can collect, and the more you learn about customers, the better you can target your audience for particular marketing campaigns.

If you’re looking at sending out more questionnaires to gather more of this data, why wouldn’t you target those who are more likely to complete your survey as they are your greatest data source?

3: Personal Interests

hobbies

Segmenting customers based on Personal Interests is an absolute must!

One key thing expert marketer and ClickFunnels co-founder Russell Brunson talks about throughout his books Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, and Traffic Secrets, is finding your perfect customer and placing your products and services in front of them.

This is basic business 101. If you sell a range of car detailing products, where are you going to advertise them…

  • Fishing forums?
  • Football forums?
  • Golf forums?

No, of course not. Obviously, you’re going to use car detailing forums.

It’s the same with email segmentation. Target people who have specified what it is you’re offering as a personal interest.

4: Email Engagement

segment emails

Email Engagement based segmentation is another great option.

Open Rate and Click-Through Rate are vital metrics to monitor if you’re offering a promotion via email.

As you naturally want the highest Click-Through Rate (when a customer clicks on the link within your email) possible, you have to target those people who are most likely to open your email to start with.

This also a great way of narrowing down the number of people on your email list/lists. If you have someone on there who never opens your emails, why are you paying for them to be on your lists in the first place?

5: Past Purchases

buy online

Segmenting by Past Purchases is a great way of selling products that you use up and either re-order or refill, such as hair care products.

Let’s say your customer buys a bottle of shampoo, you can make an estimation of how long it will take for your customer to use all of that product and send them a timely email advertising the shampoo along with other hair care products that they may be interested in purchasing.

6: Time Since Last Purchase

timer & dollars

Segmenting by Last Order Placed could be used in two ways.

  1. Loyal repeat customers: These people purchase something from you on a regular basis so you need to keep emailing these people about products and services they may be interested in.
  2. One time customers: Someone may have purchased something from you a while back, or used to buy from you but hasn’t done so for some time. Either way, you could target these customers to try and get them back on board.

7: Website Behaviour

website data

Tracking what your visitors are looking at on your website is vital. They may not buy from your site on that particular day but you can send an email offering them products they’ve been looking at along with other related products.

How many emails do you get from Amazon or eBay for example, offering you products that you’ve been looking at?

8: Position Reached In Your Sales Funnel

sales funnel example

If like me you use ClickFunnels, or any other sales funnel service, you can add tracking pixels to every page on sales funnel which will collect data about who has seen what stage.

Not everybody will go through the entire sales funnel process at the first visit, so it’s vital that you track who has seen what step.

Criteria that you can set here includes:

  • People who saw the landing page
  • People who saw the thank you page
  • People who abandoned the cart – ie added to the shopping cart but didn’t complete the purchase

Cart abandonment is key here. These people had the intention of buying but something stopped them from doing so. These people are the best ones to target in a readvertising campaign.

9: Geographical Location

pin in map

Geographic segmentation is another great way of narrowing down your target audience from the entire world, to a specific country all the way down to a specific city or town.

If you’re a local business, say an auto repair shop in New York City, you wouldn’t waste time targeting people living in Los Angles, would you?

Or it may be that a product you’re selling isn’t legal in a specific area. CJ PonyParts a Ford Mustang parts retailer is a perfect example here. They have an exhaust system in stock, the Borla S-Type, this exhaust system is illegal in California due to it exceeding the permitted noise level in that state, so CJ’s needs to avoid advertising this product to customers in California.

10: Total Amount Spent

pile of money

Total Amount Spent segmentation could be a great one for you if you have a range of products that vary in price from low value to high value.

Using your customer’s purchase history, you can work out which of your current customers are more likely to be able to afford your higher-end products. You can target your more expensive items specifically to the customers you feel are more likely to buy them.

An example 3 tier targeting system you could use if you want to run a promotion:

  1. VIP Customers – People with lots of spare income – Offer high ticket items
  2. Regular Customers – People who buy from you on a regular basis – Offer a small (10%) discount
  3. Sales Customers – People who tend to buy from you when you have a sale on – Offer a larger (20%-30%) discount

You could also use this method to reward your most loyal customers.

Conclusion

Behavioral segmentation of customers isn’t just for giant company brands like Amazon, eBay, and the like, you can do it too with your own email autoresponder service provider.

If your provider doesn’t offer this, then I highly recommend GetResponse or AWeber to you.

Both of these email marketing tools offer this service as part of your subscription, and both have excellent customer support should you need their help.

Thank you for taking the time to read my 10 best ways to segment customers for e-commerce article, I hope you found it helpful and you feel more confident to begin your customer segmentation process.

Disclaimer: I am an independent AWeber and GetResponse Affiliate, not an employee of either. All views expressed on my blog are my own based on my own experience of using the AWeber and Get Response software I am reviewing. I may receive a commission for any links you click on and make a purchase.

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