The weeks leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a make-or-break time for brands. Many are on a mission to turn carts into purchases and prospects into customers. With pressure looming over the biggest sale of the year, what can brands do to ensure they’re on track for success?
Even if you’re falling short of your projected goals, there’s one strategy that can help you get back on course: audience segmentation. In this marketing approach, brands break customer lists down into subgroups, leading to more tailored messaging and greater audience engagement.
Audience segmentation offers opportunities for brands to accelerate success quickly; however, there’s also room for mistakes — which can be costly if you don’t know how to work around them.
One of the largest mistakes brands make — especially with email campaigns — is falling into a habit. Some brands get comfortable with their metrics and stick to their routine because it gives them satisfactory results. With email, there’s a fairly high success rate for less effort compared to other sizable campaigns, and brands don’t realize that the ceiling could be much higher. When you optimize email campaigns, you can see improved results that could push your brand from satisfactory to outstanding.
Another mistake comes in the setup of email and SMS campaigns. Many brands take a “batch-and-blast” approach, meaning they send messages to their entire customer list. When you batch and blast, it diminishes the value of future messages you send to individual recipients. Additionally, sending batch and blast campaigns could cause messages to be flagged as spam — which is costly before the holiday season.
To avoid these major marketing mistakes, brands can utilize audience segmentation. By breaking down customers into smaller groups and identifying their needs, you can better target your messaging and create more engaging content for them.
Many fashion and apparel brands segment by locale to target specific customers. For example, consumers residing in areas with traditionally cold or wet weather during the holidays can be segmented and targeted with apparel for this type of weather.
During this time of year, holiday shopper segmentations are crucial. Some shoppers are only active in the market during the holiday season, namely Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so you want specific messaging to point them toward your brand.
A subset of the holiday shopper category is the discount shopper. Some luxury and premium brands aren’t big on the discount and sales category; however, even if it's not a big portion of what you do, having a discount shopper segment is helpful. Why? Because it allows you to promote and sell inventory at a discount without it becoming a big part of how your brand is perceived.
Another segment is the churn risk audience. This group consists of customers who bought a product from you once but are unlikely to buy that product from you again. When you’re not on the top of their search list, the churn risk segment can be helpful to develop specific content strategies and get them to reconnect, keeping you top of mind in the most meaningful way.
When you know your top segmentation categories, how do you place the right people into the right categories and take action?
One helpful tip is to look at consumer behavior and product interest. Who’s engaging but not purchasing? Which consumers are buying which products the most?
“Most of us have that purchase history,” Jordan Brannon, President of Coalition Technologies, explains. “We have the ability to go back into our orders and essentially see what people have bought, and we can then customize and target our emails and automations based on user interest in specific product types and certain brands.”
However, Jordan warns brands to be cautious about SMS. During the holiday season especially, it’s best to send fewer SMS campaigns. Despite this, when you carry segmentation data over to these campaigns, they’ll become much more effective — even if you’re sending fewer campaigns.
Consumers are much more open to multiple email campaigns, especially when they’re targeted correctly. When you customize and target emails based on purchase history and data, consumers will be much more willing to open and engage with the messages because they’re catered to specific consumer needs.
