Very Simple Segmentation Ideas for Retailers

Segmentation Strategy is a pretty common theme among eMarketers; we’ve covered some simple strategies in other posts on the blog – buyers vs. non-buyers, leveraging preference data etc. We recently got a little insight from a marketing manager of an apparel company and his criteria to target buyers:

1) Recency – Check the time associated with the last order and when the recipient became a customer. Their strategy is to flag the person quickly for targeting with more personalized emails.

2) Frequency – Recipients who buy once are encouraged to quickly buy again; two-time buyers are pushed to three etc. Once the customer is over the five-time buyer mark they are put into a special category where the goal becomes creating a dialogue with this customer.

3) Average Order – They evaluate the total revenue and margin from the customer, the higher the values the higher their customer rating. Higher margin customers get five stars and are treated with a lot of respect and work hard to move the high revenue/ lower margin customers to higher margin products.

4) Geography – They realize that certain products don’t sell in certain climates or year-round so timing and geography become key factors. Geography also plays into their timing, they have seen an up-tick in sales from recipients shopping at work around 11:00AM and 3:00PM, so they release based on time zones to grab the multi-tasking worker.

5) Payment Method – Customers purchasing by check or PayPal are treated differently than those who pay by credit card (and not all credit cards are created equally.)

Just a few items to think about while developing the right mix for you to create interactive conversations with your customers…