You’re Missing Pieces of the Online Segmentation Puzzle

An open letter to marketers worldwide: the future of segmentation on your website

Dear Marketers,

There is a segmentation gap and I’m not sure where it came from or why it exists.

Consider this: list segmentation has been a standard practice for marketers since the beginning of marketing. If you think about it, that’s what a “list” is in the first place: it’s a segment of all consumers available.

We marketers are trained into segmentation by birthright, because that’s what we do. “Right message, right person, right time.” Our rallying cry.

We segment our customer lists inside our CRM. We segment our email lists inside our ESP. We segment the crap out of our media buys.

For example, if we want to get a message out to all customers that purchased Product X and live in City Y, no problem. That’s a simple CRM segmentation (or ESP, if you have that data in there). Make the segment; send the email; push it to Facebook; buy the media; job done. Pat yourself on the back and on to the next campaign.

We’re kicking ass, aren’t we? We’re getting the right message out to the right person at the right time.

Wait a minute. There’s an entire piece to the puzzle that we’re completely missing. Lift yourself up to 10,000 feet and take another look.

On the highest level, there are two things happening with your brand:

1. Brand messages going OUT to your target market
2. People coming IN to your brand after responding to your messages

All this segmentation that we’re doing only covers #1 — the messages going out. What about the other half? What about the people coming in?

While some marketers try to do some segmentation on their website, what we’ve seen nearly across the board is just about every visitor to their website sees exactly the same thing. Some small bits and pieces of a few very specific online customer flows might incorporate some level of segmentation, but it’s very rarely baked in to the overall experience.

Does that make sense? Your website is your #1 asset online — why don’t we do a better job of segmenting the experience on our most important digital real estate?

Clearly I don’t have to explain the importance of segmentation because, as mentioned in the outset, all marketers inherently understand how crucial it is.

What I’ve come to understand in practice is that it’s generally seen as an afterthought. There’s an underlying assumption that, since we’ve done such an amazing job of segmenting our messages going OUT, somehow the people coming IN don’t need relevant messages.

Doesn’t that completely fly in the face of everything we believe in? If we strongly believe in segmentation on one side of the equation, why would we feel that it’s okay to drop the ball on the other side?

Of course it’s not okay. It violates our core belief: right message, right person, right time. If we’re showing all website visitors the exact same thing, it’s guaranteed that at least some portion of your audience is seeing the wrong message at the wrong time. Just ask your customer service team how many inquiries they get about offers that customers saw but shouldn’t be eligible for.

So what’s a better way to do things?

We’re getting there. But, before we can get to that, we must define the problem. In order for onsite segmentation to be effective, we must be able to segment by these criteria:

• WHO
• WHAT
• WHERE

(“When” and “why” generally aren’t segmentable in B2C unless you involve sales reps, eg. “When are you looking to make a purchase?” and “Why are you in the market for XYZ?”)

Now, let’s break these down. Why is each segment important and why aren’t most marketers able to take advantage of it?

WHO

Why it’s important: Just like we segment our customer lists, we want to be able to segment messages on our website. Examples: customers who purchased product Y, customers who shop in-store, people with product Z in their cart, etc.

Why it’s difficult: Making this data available to the website is extremely difficult. You already have this data, but how do you actually use it in a meaningful way when 90% or so of your website visitors are completely anonymous? This is the problem we’re solving at AddShoppers — more on this later.

WHERE

Note: I’m using “where” here as in “where a customer is in their journey” rather than “where” as in physical location. Geolocation would actually fall under “who”, eg. “customers who are located in San Francisco”.

Why it’s important: Relevance. Each visitor that comes to the website needs to be scored, so you always know where they are in their individual customer journey and can deliver relevant messages.

Why it’s difficult: People don’t shop in straight lines. While some marketers employ a very rudimentary version of this — showing different messages on the home, product, cart, and success pages — it doesn’t work very well in practice.

WHAT

Why it’s important: We want to know what a customer is interested in. Are they browsing a lot of shoes on your site, or shirts? What do they have in their cart?

Why it’s difficult: This is generally easier data to gain than “who”, although many marketers still do not leverage it.

So the better way to do onsite segmentation, then?

I think it’s fairly obvious at this point, but I’d recommend incorporating these segments as follows:

1. WHO: First, identify who someone is and what data you already have from their customer record, if any.
2. WHERE: Then, track where they are in their customer journey.
3. WHAT: Lastly, layer in offers based on specific items the user has shown interest in.

One last thing.

As you can see, segmenting on your website isn’t nearly as easy as it is elsewhere. Many marketers don’t even have the tools necessary to make this segmentation happen in the first place:

• WHO: Identity resolution to turn anonymous website traffic into known customers & segments
• WHERE & WHAT: Engine to track and score onsite activity and location within the customer journey

So it doesn’t happen.

But we’re here to change that.

We’re working on something called ShopperGraph™ — our proprietary data network of 300M+ shoppers. With it, you instantly get the WHO without actually receiving any PII. Then, our Customer Data Platform includes a powerful predictive intent scoring and segmentation engine that gives you the WHERE & WHAT.

Onsite segmentation goes from “we don’t know if this is even possible” to “done” — so you can finally segment the missing half of your marketing efforts.