Regardless of the type of business that you run and its scale, it’s safe to assume that your ultimate goal is to acquire customers—unless you run a charity.
But when it comes to customer acquisition, you must understand that it doesn’t matter if you have a million-strong target audience, not all of them are going to become paying customers.
And even those who become customers will need some encouragement from your end. In marketing, this process of encouraging leads is called lead nurturing—most businesses carry out lead nurturing intentionally or unintentionally.
Say you’re already aware of lead nurturing and are running active campaigns to convert your leads into customers. Are these campaigns delivering the results you’re expecting?
If not, chances are you’re taking a more generalised approach to boost your conversions and it’s time to look at lead nurturing through a different lens and take a more tailored approach. Enter customer segmentation.
Here’s how it can help you better nurture your leads and improve your conversion rate.
What is customer segmentation?
Understanding what customer segmentation is before diving into how it can help improve lead nurturing can help you create bespoke lead nurturing campaigns that work for you.
In simple terms, segmenting customers entails categorising your audience into groups based on some common characteristics.
It could be age, gender, interests, geographical location, income, educational background, or any differentiating characteristics you can think of.
For instance, if you’re running an eCommerce business that sells shoes, in addition to the usual customer categories, you can segment your customers based on the type of shoes they want, their purpose of buying a shoe (adventure, sports, hiking, walking), or even the stage of their customer journey.
Once you have identified unique customer segments, you can create bespoke lead nurturing strategies that address the pain points of each segment.
Why is it important to segment customers?
For most businesses, the target audience is made up of a diverse group of individuals with varying interests and needs. If the lead nurturing campaigns don’t address these specific pain points, the audience is not going to engage with them.
Let’s take our eCommerce shoe business example into account again. If your lead nurturing campaigns are too general and the messaging only addresses general issues any customer looking to purchase footwear will have, the audience looking to buy shoes for very specific purposes, like hiking or sports, will feel alienated.
In addition, the interests and preferences of leads are likely to evolve as they progress through their customer journey. Even the needs of your existing customers will change over time.
That’s why it’s important to identify unique customer segments with unique pain points and tailor your marketing material—be it emails, social posts, blog posts, or videos—and messaging to address those issues.
How effective is segmenting customers for lead nurturing?
According to Mailchimp, segmented lead nurturing emails had a 14.31% higher open rate than non-segmented emails. The clicks also increased by over 101%, while they saw reductions in bounce rates, unsubscribes, and spam reporting.
Another study found that segmenting leads improved sales by 89% while also increasing the average order value by 59%.
How can you segment customers?
Here’s a quick breakdown of the steps you need to follow to segment your potential customers and create bespoke lead nurturing campaigns for them.
- Collect customer data: A good customer segmentation strategy starts with data, so collect as much data as possible about your customers.
- Identify common characteristics: Once you have a large pool of data, you will start to see some patterns and similarities among customers.
- Determine categories based on common characteristics: After you’ve identified some unique characteristics, you can group customers who have similar characteristics together.
- Create a customer persona: With the categories you’ve identified, create a customer persona based on their unique characteristics.
- Tailor your messaging: Finally, customise your messaging based on each customer persona.
Want to boost conversions? Segment your customers
Lead nurturing is a critical part of marketing, as it allows you to turn your leads into paying customers.
But for your lead nurturing campaigns to be successful, you need to embrace customer segmentation.
Feel free to get in touch with us if you’d like to learn more about this.
