Step eight: Customer experience – Audience segmentation in digital marketing

Building a database of customers is great… but it leaves us wondering what can we do with it and what does it mean for our customers?

If you’ve optimised your website content and website speed, then your next natural step is looking after those who will be viewing it: your customers. Customers want their privacy respected. So, the option to personalise their privacy settings is a sure way to keep them happy and in your database. Having an excellent understanding of audience segmentation in digital marketing will help you successfully manage your customers’ trust. It’s about quality, not quantity. Sending mass emails to long lists is a big investment without a guaranteed return.

Over-emailing has many knock-on effects. It assumes that your customers are always available to you, when they may be too busy for that level of communication. Bombarding customers with excessive information also doesn’t ensure interest. We always recommend quality over quantity. Make sure you only contact customers when necessary to avoid overfilling their inboxes or the chances of them unsubscribing. Adapting a considerate approach like this will build a much greater rapport between you, leading to increased interest and higher chances of turning subscriptions into sales.

So, how do we find the customers that are interested? Good news, all you have to do is ask! The choice to opt-in or out of specific email lists will increase the number of customers interested in your offers. The more you base your customer engagement on individual interests, the greater the customer response will be to your service. When you understand what people need and when they need it, it stops being a hard sell. Instead, it becomes a means of strategic alignment. Categorising your customers by their interests is called audience segmentation, and is one of the best tools for customisation and personalisation in your digital marketing campaigns.