Mining Your CRM for Deep Customer Engagement Using Segmentation

by Jennifer Seitz.

Better understanding of and unique messaging to your customer segments will enhance revenues.

If you’ve been using your CRM for a while, you likely have a wealth of information stockpiled that you could be putting to good use to deepen customer engagement. The question is:

Are you using your CRM to take your customer engagement to the next level?

In a world where the name of the game is getting as personal as possible with your customer, be sure to optimize the data points you currently have to their fullest extent. Here’s what you need to know about tapping into the data you already have and executing on a mission to gain more insights over time.

Segmentation success stats that are hard to ignore:

• According to Marketo, 79% of consumers report they only engage brand offers that are relevant to a previous activity.
• Evergage reports that 96% of digital marketers are getting better engagement and conversion rates using segmentation strategies.

So, if segmentation is engaging customers, reducing customer acquisition costs and increasing conversions…where do I (and my CRM) begin?

Let’s start by making sure we have a firm grasp on what a segment looks like.

A segment is a group that can be lumped together based on by common characteristics. From the marketer’s perspective, these common characteristics will vary based on your business’s proprietary variables but generally fall into some predictable buckets such as:

• Demographics
• Purchase Frequency
• Purchase Dollar Amounts
• First-time buyers

Take a look at attributes and events.

Creating segments that make sense for your business may involve an analysis of attributes or events. Examples of attributes include age, gender, device type, favorite brand, etc. An event that may help you create a segment might include last item purchased, push notification opt-in, completed registration, app download, etc.

Consider CRM segmentation best practices and tips.

Once you’ve determined what data points your CRM already has that can be used to segment your audience, you’ll need to follow some key best practices:

1. Set a goal for your segmentation. Perhaps your goal is to win back former customers or to prevent drop-off that routinely occurs after your customers hit a certain point in your funnel. Regardless of what your unique goal is, be sure to have one clearly defined as you set out on your CRM segmentation journey.
2. Don’t over-segment. While it might seem like the-more-segments-the-better strategy makes sense, don’t fall into the trap of oversegmenting. Creating three to five distinct segments is often a great place to start. Remember you have to create unique messaging for each group, so it has to make sense to put resources toward the segment.
3. Serve up the right content for the right place in the customer journey. Understanding where your customer (or prospective customer) is in the journey and serving up the right message at the right time is the tipping point for success in customer engagement initiatives. Once you’ve built your segments, port them over to your marketing automation tool to ensure you capture the customer at the right time.
4. Always be testing. Once you’ve created your initial segmentation groups, you can’t, unfortunately, rest on your laurels. The key to using your CRM to deepen your customer engagement is to measure, analyze and test continuously. For example, through your careful analysis, you may find that one of your segments in unnecessary or that a key group of customers responds better on a specific channel or to a specific type of message better than others.

Examples of list segmentation campaigns created with the help of your CRM that can deepen customer engagement:

• Communicate with your cold customers. Offer a special discount to win back customers who haven’t purchased your product in a certain time frame.
• Optimize your current customers. Serve up a People Who Bought This Also Bought This message to create a lift in sales from current customers.
• Get local. Send email newsletters to your customers based on their demographics that include travel itineraries or local happenings.
• Reward your super users. Deepen your engagement with your most profitable and loyal customers by acknowledging them with exclusive perks.
• Get time-savvy. Understanding the sweet spot in terms of timing when it comes to the purchasing funnel can help you combat high drop-off rates in the purchase process.

No two users are created equal. In fact, one user may prefer to interact with your brand on mobile while another only shops at your brick and mortar locations. Your messaging will clearly pivot for these two diverse yet profitable customers. Understanding your customer and creating segments with the help of your CRM to communicate with them on their terms can help deepen your customer engagement and ultimately lift your revenue numbers.

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Editors note: This article was first published on JobNimbus’ blog and can be viewed here.

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