As a consumer, doesn’t it feel like magic when you get the right recommendation at the right time? Well, marketers have seen behind the curtain and know it takes a lot more effort than a swift wave of a wand to make that happen. It’s a bit more challenging than that—though, wouldn’t that be nice? 

To help make the process of individualization feel a bit more like magic for the marketers behind the best experiences we’ve put together the four best steps you can take to make individualization a reality! Below, we’ve got a quick peek at the first one: Segmentation. But be sure to download the full whitepaper to get all the tips and tricks you need to make magic happen. 

Step 1 for Individualization Magic: Segmentation

Your audience is at the heart of your individualization efforts. After all, individualization is about creating an experience unique to each customer. To do so, however, you need to first start with segmentation. Understanding your audience and dividing them into similar groups—based on available data—gives you the ability to easily add some baseline individualization into your marketing messaging.

Watch Traditional Segmentation Strategies Transform!

Since we’re trying to get to individualization, let’s start there…at the individual. Let’s use the example of a 35-year-old customer buying a toy for a child. They discovered the toys through a quick online search, purchased a toy and received a follow up coupon prompting them to add their child’s birthday to their profile. 

Except, the customer doesn’t have kids. They were buying a birthday gift for a friend’s child. 

Brands often make assumptions based on what customers have done in the past, not where they would like to go in the future. With traditional segmentation strategies, this customer would likely continue receiving irrelevant messaging about a child they don’t have. To break old segmentation patterns and build the audience your brand wants, you need some new tricks.

3 Tricks for Better Segmentation

There’s a popular process called the 4 Disciplines of Execution framework (4DX), developed by FranklinCovey, that helps you execute your strategies more effectively. Ideally, after adopting the four disciplines into your processes, you have an actionable how-to plan. Well, we said we wanted you to feel like individualization is waving a magic wand, so we’ve waved our own wand and condensed the four disciplines into three tricks you can start using today. As a preview, here’s one of those tricks. 

Reflect and Visualize Your Ideal Audience

Instead of trying to come up with a comprehensive segmentation strategy for your entire database, reflect and visualize what your ideal audience looks like. 

Here’s the catch: just choose one. Otherwise, you’ll get caught up in accomplishing everyday tasks, which FranklinCovey refers to as “the whirlwind.”  

Your ideal customer may be a new market segment. It could be a set of existing customers that you’re rolling out a new product to. Whoever it is, make sure you’re clear on who you’re trying to attract to your brand and why.

Once you have a good grasp on who that ideal customer is, look into what is your team currently doing with segmentation that gets you closer to your ideal customer?

For example, Curology, a personalized skincare brand, creates custom events for any customer data point, including whether members have uploaded a recent photo of their skin’s progress.

Those who haven’t are segmented and sent a targeted SMS message that reminds them to send a photo update and explains why it matters. Most importantly, members are able to snap a selfie and respond directly to the text—dramatically reducing the friction in patient-to-provider response rates.

Curology’s segmentation becomes even more sophisticated during the customer journey. Email follow-ups are triggered automatically if members haven’t shared a photo in a certain number of days.

These strategies, amongst others, resulted in customer engagement increasing by 26% and revenue increasing by 10%.

Your ideal audience is engaged. As Curology shows, once you’ve identified that audience, it’s important to find the right interactions to add value to their experience.

Add Tricks Up Your Sleeve

Above is just the first segmentation trick we highlight in our individualization magic whitepaper. With the others, you’ll have the tricks up your sleeve to make a joyful individualized experience that much easier to achieve. Download your copy today!