With customers with distinct geographical, demographical, and behavioral characteristics, it has become almost impossible to sort them out to gain a deeper insight into your overall customer data; consequently, the task of creating more dynamic, data-driven, and personalized marketing strategies becomes more complex.
Flexible segmentation allows marketers to capture audience interests and desires across geographic boundaries without millions of dollars, hundreds of surveyors, and months of research. More importantly, flexible segmentation isn’t easily derailed by unexpected disruptions because it relies more on real-time data.
https://marketingtechnews.net/news/2021/feb/08/the-most-important-elements-of-customer-segmentation-in-2021/
Imagine you want to know how many active customers you have that tend to add items to the cart but never complete the order, or the average number of high-value customers you have, or maybe how many have stopped being active, and the list could go on! This is where customer segmentation becomes an essential marketing tool to help your business grow.
What is customer segmentation?
Customer segmentation is the process of grouping your customers according to shared characteristics. If implemented right, segmentation could be the key to understanding your target audience and providing products that serve the market needs.
According to segmentation experts, there are 4 types of characteristics of which you can use to segment customers:
- Geographical: attributes like countries, cities, languages, areas…
- Demographical: information such as age, gender, income, social status, etc.
- Psychographic: customer Interests, needs, lifestyle, and so on.
- Behavioral: data like engagement, purchases, viewed product, and browsing behavior.
Identifying these attributes and grouping customers manually is difficult and impossible if one segmentation includes multiple attributes from different customer characteristics. Now, Gameball allows you to segment your customers according to your business needs and growth plan.
Why is segmenting customers important?
There are various functionalities for segmentation. It isn’t limited to marketing; given that segmentation influences different business areas, every department must clearly understand its importance and outcomes. Here are some of the benefits segmentation provides:
Understand and analyze your market through your pool of different customers
Often many customer-related questions go through the mind of e-commerce retailers, such as:
- Which customers provide the highest revenue and profit potential?
- Which customers struggle with finding their needs on your platform? Where is the product gap?
- What type of customers tends to exist in our customer base? And why?
- What retention programs should be developed for each customer segment?
Segmentation leads to all the answers to the previous questions. For example, by creating segments that add customers of the highest revenue, you can browse the list of these customers and learn more about them.
Gain deeper insights on customer behavior
When analyzing data and conducting research, you get an opportunity to better understand how your customers behave or at least some of them when they’re grouped. For example, when creating a segment that adds players with the same behavior, you get to see, on average, how many of your customers belong there, and how long a customer tends to stay or belong to this segment.
Introduce dynamic and more data-driven marketing strategies
Planning and creating strategies based on data is the key to a successful and guaranteed growth in acquisition and retention. As just mentioned, segmentation provides the data you need to monitor your customer-base growth; moreover, come up with strategies that help retain your current customers, especially the valuable ones.
Personalize your communication with your customers
When reaching out to customers, it’s difficult to appeal to the vast pool of customers you have all at once; consequently, the desired effect of this communication compromises. When segmenting your customer, you can customize different and personalized messages that speak to each segment independently.
How does customer segmentation work?
People often get confused and can’t differentiate between segmenting customers, filtering a list of customers, and simply applying tags.
While filtering and applying tags has its own utilization, like manually granting some points as a gesture, or marking a group as unique customers. Still, no matter how capable the filter is in listing precisely the group of customers you need, you will always be limited with the attributes the filter offers you. Segmentation has a broader pool of variables that you can select from to accurately recognize and identify the customers you’re targeting.
As mentioned above, segmentation works differently and is used for distinctive objectives. Here is how segmentation work and the critical benefits for applying it:
Automatic
Once you create a segment and set its rules and conditions, you no longer need to intervene from your side. The grouping process will occur automatically; adding the customers whose behavior and profile matches with a specific segment will be done independently.
Dynamic
Unlike tags, just because a customer was added to a segment they match with doesn’t mean they’re bound to stay there forever. A customer could stay at a segment for as long as their criteria meet the rules and conditions of that segment; once this no longer applies, they will be automatically removed from this segment, dismissing them from all the pre-set/configured programs and messages that were designed to reach customers under this specific segment.
Real-time
Shortly after a segment is created or edited, the process of placing customers in their matching segments will take place. This takes no longer than a few minutes.
About Gameball player segmentation
Gameball allows you to create segments based on your players’ geographical, demographical, and behavioral criteria; however, it’s understandable to feel confused and not know where to start.
Segmentation could sound complicated at first, but following a simple process and using the right tools would get the most effective results with the least effort. Here are the steps you need to follow to create the customer segments that go with your platform needs.
1- Identify the segment types that would serve your needs
Go through the list of players and pinpoint the type of lists that would be beneficial for you to recognize and separately identify. Think of the type of player groups you would feel curious to learn more about their mass and the duration to which this group would stretch or shrink. Think also about the actions or messages you would convey to a certain segment of players if you had your fingers on.
Examples of these segments could be:
- High-value customers
- Hesitant customers
- Semi-engaged
- Referrers
- Inactive
- and so on…
In summary, your segments should be distinctively different and focus on the right factors.
2- List each segment criteria
Now that you have identified the clusters of players you think are worth grouping, start thinking about the metric that would decide if a player belongs to that group or not. It’s similar to posting job criteria for an open vacancy. Naturally, you would state the minimum level of experience needed, the certificates they should possess, and the preferable set of skills they should have. Well, it’s not that different with segment criteria.
Here is an example, If you creating a segment for the high-value customers/VIPs that you have, your criteria would be something like this:
- Total number of orders is more than 10
- Total spent amount more than $500
- Last login date was less than 7 days ago
Another example of hesitant customers:
- Number of products added to cart > 10 AND number of products bought < 4
OR
- Number of products viewed > 15 AND number of products bought is empty
3- Create the segments on Gameball dashboard
When both the segments and their criteria are identified, all you need would be to visit the players’ section on Gameball’s dashboard, navigate to the segment tab, click on “Create New Segment,” and start listing down all your segment criteria in the form of rules and conditions. Learn more about the process of creating a segment on Gameball.
Create a segment rule or condition using one of two attribute types:
- Player Attribute: All player information gathered by Gameball and reflected in the player profile as attributes; can be used to create rules and conditions that characterize the segment. Here are some examples of the player attributes you can use while creating a segment:
- Points
- Level
- Total Orders Count
- Total Amount Spent
- Average Order Value
- Gender
- Date Of Birth
- Player Join Date
- Country
- City
Check the full list here.
- Event: Segment players based on their behavior on your platform.
For example, players who tend to add products to the cart or visit the same product multiple times without completing a purchase could be segmented as “hesitant players.”
Note: You can use both events and player attributes to create the rules of one segment.
4- Use Gameball’s business and marketing tools to target each segment
Once a segment is created and saved, players who match any of the existing segments will be added to it, giving you analytics and a clear view of the size of each segment. You can then decide how to address each segment if you need to address them at all; for example, you can create a special redemption rule for the semi engaged customers, or send a personalized message to the hesitant customers whenever they view or add a product to the cart to motivate them to complete the purchase. Here are the Gameball tools you can use on segmented customers:
- Challenges: Create a new challenge that shall reward only specific segments you have chosen.
- Redemption Rules: Create a redemption rule like free shipping that shall be used by a particular segment of players.
- Messages: Launch a campaign or send a message that will only be displayed to a targeted segment.
- Add or Deduct points: Manually add or remove points from a group of players.
After creating a segment, you can always edit or delete any of them, including the two default segments – Active and Inactive – that Gameball has created for you.
As always, stay tuned for our monthly updates as more exciting updates are in the works. We are trying to continually enhance our experience and fulfill all your requests and needs.
If you have any comments or suggestions, please send us an email to support@gameball.co
Nada Sobhi
Bassma Khaled
Mirette Osama
