5 Ways to Automate Customer Segmentation

The essence of a good marketing strategy is to know your customer better than your competitor does. The better you segment your customer base, the more are your chances of selling your product or service in a way that meets or even exceeds your customer’s expectations.

A CRM system, if well designed, can be a huge enabler for your customer segmentation strategy.

It can help you to not just record customer data but also can provide actionable insights and enable execution of targeted marketing techniques to drive maximum ROI.

Here are five ways you can target your customer segmentation like never before:

1. Track Lead Behavior

Lead scoring is a brilliant way to automatically quantify the probability of lead conversion by closely tracking lead behavior. Know how the lead responds to your communication and you can figure out the level of interest or any specific queries that the lead may have. For example, if a lead clicks on the pricing page of your website, it is highly probable that he is considering your product for purchase. Imagine being able to deliver a pop up in real time, with a great discount offer to this lead. That is what a powerful CRM system can do. It can create unforgettable customer experiences using behavioral customer segmentation. Agile CRM allows you to segment customers by automatically calculating lead scores based on online behavior (page visits, downloads), email performance (opens, click-through rates), social engagement (likes, shares) or company information (in B2B cases).

2. Segment by Sales Funnel stage

In B2B scenarios, the sales process is closely aligned to a customer’s buying process. For example, consider a business software firm pitching to a prospect company. Typically, the sales funnel would have the following stages,
a. Introductory presentation
b. Free Trial
c. Formal proposal
d. Negotiation
e. Contract signing

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Since your CRM system can segment all contacts based on the stage of the sales funnel they are currently at, you can send targeted marketing communication and collateral to respective segments. Communication can be triggered automatically on the completion of specific milestones, say end of trial period. With Agile CRM, you can customize your sales process milestones with drag and drop ease and filter deals accordingly to create targeted marketing lists. The main objective of this kind of segmentation is to expedite the customer’s journey through the sales funnel in a smooth manner.

3. Segment by Product Preferences

In case you offer multiple product lines, it is extremely important to segment customers based on their choice of products. Agile CRM enables you to tag products against leads and customers to easily create product wise marketing communication lists. You can also use these lists to upsell or cross-sell relevant products and for managing post sales service agreements. Tagging is essentially a flexible method for customer segmentation based on products and other parameters.

4. Monitor Customer Satisfaction Scores

If you are able to identify signs of dwindling customer satisfaction among few customer segments, you may be able to engage with them better and resolve issues, if any. With Agile CRM, you can create custom web survey forms to record customer satisfaction scores. This score can then become an important parameter for customer segmentation and communication, just like lead scores. Also, you can integrate the social profiles of your customers into the CRM system. It will help you further understand their satisfaction levels and tag influencers.

5. Calculate Customer Lifetime Value

Categorize customers based on their expected revenue, relationship size and longevity. You can better nurture your valuable customers by making this segmentation visible across your enterprise so that the service levels are uniform across the customer’s life cycle and across touch points. Agile CRM enables you to calculate realized revenue by customer and also predict future sales values of the customer based on sales funnel visibility. It also allows tagging of customer segments such as VIP customers, loyal customers and more.

Customer segmentation is the cornerstone for creating delightful customer experiences. Without a powerful CRM system that can deliver advanced customer analytics and automate campaigns based on the same, the effectiveness of even well drafted marketing communication can fall dramatically. Agile CRM has advanced features for customer segmentation across sales, marketing and service modules, which can help you deliver the right communication to the right audience at the right time, every time.