Targeted contact segmentation is the key to successful marketing automation. Only those who group their target audiences precisely can create individual, personalized campaigns that truly resonate.
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What are segments?
Definition
Segments are a group of your contacts who share certain attributes. For example, you can segment contacts based on a contact’s location. This can help you send location-based offers or promotions to that particular group of contacts.
Segmenting contacts – Application examples
As shown in the following application examples, contact segments help you make personalized offers and thus design more successful marketing automations:
For individual offers:
- A local café can segment all contacts from Zurich to send them special offers.
- An online shop could group loyal customers by order volume and make VIP offers.
Further applications:
- Newsletter optimization: Segment your contacts according to topic interests, e.g. “Product Updates”, “Events” and “User Tips”. This allows you to ensure that everyone only receives the content that really interests them – without flooding them with irrelevant information.
- Increase customer satisfaction: Only include contacts who have recently had a support case in a survey campaign.
Criteria for segmentation
To ensure that your marketing automations are precise and relevant, it is important to choose the right criteria for segmenting your contacts. Depending on the objective and data basis, you can use various dimensions:
Demo- and psychographic criteria
- Age: Young adults, families, seniors – depending on age, there may be different interests and communication styles.
- Gender: For some products or services, addressing by gender may be useful.
- Location: City, region, country – relevant for local events, shipping conditions or regional offers.
- Interests and hobbies: Information from surveys, social media analyses or website interactions
- Values and attitudes: Example: Environmental awareness, affinity for technology
Behavior-based criteria
- Website activity: Which pages were visited? How long was the contact active? Did the contact perform certain actions (e.g. a download)?
- Email interactions: Open rates, clicks on specific links or reactions to specific campaigns.
- Product usage: Which products or services does the contact already use?
Purchasing criteria and transaction data
- Number of purchases: New customers, regular customers, inactive customers
- Shopping cart size: Small occasional purchases vs. large investments
- Purchase history: Interest in specific product categories
Data from CRM system
- Lead status: New, qualified, inactive
- Customer affiliation: Specific industries or company sizes (particularly important in B2B marketing)
Depending on the scope and quality of your data, you can combine these criteria. For example: Female contacts from Zurich who have visited a product page in the last 30 days.
When applied correctly, these filters enable you to address your audience in an extremely targeted and personalized way.
Apply segmentation directly?
Sign up for a one-month Aivie Pro free trial to get to know the tool and contact segmentation.
Segments management
With Aivie, you have a marketing automation tool for your segment management. You can create new segments, manage existing segments, target campaigns and emails to specific segments. And thus bring order and structure to your contacts.
View contacts
When you look at the segments, you will see in the right column how many contacts belong to each segment. You can click on it to view the associated contacts.
Create segment
You can create a segment quickly and easily using the “+New” button in the top right corner. Enter a name and briefly describe what the segment is used for so that everyone who uses the tool knows.
The alias must be a unique, alphanumeric string without spaces or special characters. This field is generated automatically if nothing is specified. It is needed to identify the segment.
It is worth creating a categorization for many segments. This could be, for example, Internal, Newsletter, Webinar or Other. A categorization that makes sense in your company.
Assign contacts
When creating a new segment, you can assign contacts to the segment using specific filters.
Once the segment has been created, you can switch to the “Filters” tab. There you have the option of adding contacts to the segment based on various conditions and contact fields.
An example: You want to create a segment for “Active in the last month”. To do this, select the filter “Date last active” and specify that it is older than or equal to one month. To ensure that only contacts who have also recorded an email address are included, this can be specified as an additional condition – see the next section.
As soon as you save the filter, the contact list of the segment is generated and all contacts that meet the conditions are added.
AND and OR condition type
If you use multiple filters, it is important to choose the correct conjunction (and/or).
AND
With “and”, all conditions must be met for contacts to be added to the segment.
An example: We need all contacts who have recorded mobile and email.
Will be added:
- Contacts for whom both mobile and email are stored.
Will not be added:
- Contacts for whom only mobile is stored, but no email
- Contacts for whom only an email is stored, but no mobile
OR
If at least one criterion must be met, select “or”.
An example: We need all contacts who have recorded a mobile or an email or both.
Will be added:
- Contacts with mobile
- Contacts with an email;
- Contacts for whom both mobile and email are stored
Will not be added:
- Contacts with neither mobile nor email.
Edit existing segment
Of course, a segment can be edited at any time. This also applies to the conditions, which, however, can influence the existing contact list of the segment. Depending on the condition, contacts are then added or removed. Important: Contacts that have been added manually must also be removed manually if necessary. They do not respond to the conditions.
If conditions are adjusted, a segment can be manually rebuilt so that the result is immediately visible and no waiting is necessary. You can do this via “Rebuild Segment” – see screen shot. Edit the segment and navigate to the small triangle next to “x Close”, where you will see this option.
Alternatively, you can also do this directly from the segment overview.
Do you fancy starting with Aivie?
Here you will find ready-made use case packages that make it very easy for you to get started. Soon you will be maintaining your own contact list and marketing automations.
