You know you should segment your customer lists.

We know you should segment your customer lists.

Everyone knows you should segment your customer lists!

When it comes to sending the right offer to the right people, it’s a super effective way to create “micro campaigns” that boost your likelihood of sales. Send your customers an offer that’s relevant and personalized to them – based on their previous purchases, behavior and engagement – and you’ve significantly increased your chances of success.

We’ve worked hard to create a system that makes it easy to segment your customer lists. Our system is in direct response to your feedback that, even though everyone knows we should be segmenting our lists, the technology hasn’t made it easy to do.

We’re changing that, and our clients are taking the ball and running with it.

Here’s a quick overview of five favorite ideas we’ve seen so far, for successful customer segmentation.

1. Anniversaries: Segmenting according to the anniversary month of when customers first joined the wine club, in order to send a Thank You message or special offer on an upcoming purchase.

2. Holiday Gifting: Suggest high-value holiday gift ideas to a “micro” segment of customers, such as those who have placed a minimum amount of orders in the last two years (they’ve ordered six times, for example), who also spent a minimum amount of money per order (let’s say $250).

3. Customers at Risk: Segment by customers that are at “High” and “Very High” risk of leaving your wine club, in order to persuade them to stay via a well-timed phone call or email or text message.

4. Loyal and High-Value Customers: Our RFM analysis segments customers by how Recently, how Frequently, and How Much they’ve spent. Communications with those customers vary accordingly. For example, loyal and potentially loyal segments of customers are your bread and butter, so protect them and treat them with care. As for “retired” or passive customers, you may want to make a final effort and then decide to keep them or stop spending effort on them.

5. First-Time Customers: Maybe they’ve purchased from you for the first time through your website, or maybe they became a wine club member this year and it’s their first holiday season with you. It’s the perfect time to welcome them with a message that speaks specifically to them.

What about you? If you could easily segment your customer lists, what would you focus on? If you had a tool that made segmentation painless and effective, what sorts of campaigns would you create? 

We’d love to hear, and add your ideas to our best practices.

Thank you, as always, for reading –

Cathy