Why is customer segmentation and profiling essential for CRM?

Why consumer segmentation and profiling are essential in CRM programs: - **Personalization**: Tailor marketing efforts to individual preferences and behaviors. - **Targeted Campaigns**: Ensure messages resonate with specific customer groups. - **Resource Efficiency**: Allocate resources where they generate the highest return on investment. - **Improved Service**: Address customer needs and concerns more effectively. - **Retention and Loyalty**: Implement strategies to boost customer loyalty and retention rates. - **Innovation Insights**: Gain valuable feedback for product development and innovation. - **Enhanced Customer Experience**: Provide a more satisfying and relevant experience for each customer.

Segmentation helps identify who can gain value from what your organization has to offer. It also makes it easier to learn from past successes, how to relate to people in that industry

Segmentation is not only interesting from a marketing and sales perspective (in order to better target customers with your offering), but also from other points of view such as customer service (what customer segments have more issues, who are "low touch") and operations (are there segments or power users that use much more resources than others, is there much more cost to specific segments using your services or products). There could be many more areas of interest in your business, don't silo the data to only be about sales and marketing. Look for insights for other parts of the business and how to achieve operational efficiencies.

Customer segments allow you to get the maximum return out of your marketing campaigns. Not only it helps you personalize messaging at scale it also helps reduce wastage and irrelevant messaging to customers who are not the right targeting for your product at the moment. Segmentation allows - custom audience creation for your acquisition and retargeting campaigns. - crosseliing and upselling different products based on cohort behaviour to improve basket size - personalized offerings at scale without human intervention through automated CRM workflows - better audience analysis and RCA - identifying customer journey pain points for different cohorts and customising services accordingly

Customer profiling and segmentation help in CRM by making it easier to: 1. Understand Customers: You get to know your customers better, what they like, and what they need. 2. Personalize Communication: You can talk to each customer in a way that feels right for them. 3. Save Time and Money: You don't waste time on customers who aren't interested, so you use your resources better.

In this age of AI and algorithms, it's crucial to offer bespoke personalisation experiences to increase loyalty, wallet share, brand recall and NPS. S&M teams need to work closely with the IT and Digital teams to carefully profile customers and prospects, divide them as logical cohorts and offer contextual feeds and recommendations. segmentation and profiling are no longer optional because customers expect some degree of personalisation and attention.

Customer segmentation and profiling is one of the most important tools in any sales role. There are a number of sales tools that can be useful in managing these interactions. In the pharmaceutical industry Veeva is often used to capture target customers, frequency of visits, meeting notes and even materials shared. I think beyond these areas it is also important to understand their personality / nature, their communication preferences, motivations so that it helps to frame your interactions in the future too.

In most cases your customers or leads will be different, they may buy more, buy less, be located in Europe/USA, be suitable for certain products and services only. Segmenting and profiling is key and a foundation block to feeding the marketing and sales teams, it contributes to having a better chance of getting even better results. Also ensures when you're reviewing your dashboards/business performance to identify areas of growth or concern or whats worked well vs what hasn't you are looking at your data in the best possible way and your confident you have a good understanding of your market and customers.

Segmentation is important for CRM because it is the basis of your CRM strategy. Even something as simple as a prospect vs customer segmentation will help you define your CRM strategy. Who are your customers? How should you relate to them? Who can be your customers? How should you relate to them?

With rapid change in service expectations and technology enhancement it’s imperative to have service journeys creating personal and curated servicing models which creates recall in customers mind set.

Segmentation depends upon the tool that you’re using to segment. The data generally has CRM. some of the CRM used feature like list to create different statements. For example HubSpot There are CRM is that also use tags to add to different contacts to them in different categories. For example mailchimp.

Many platforms don’t really allow you much insight into the profile of each individual because the data they collect or provide is anonymous. Simply grabbing the data from each platform isn’t going to be effective if that’s the case. To truly understand your customers, you need a single source of truth. That’s why it’s best if you can integrate all these touchpoints into your CRM of choice. The it becomes easier to generate reports and lists based on activity across multiple platforms and have it accurately attributed to an actual person or entity.

Rather than adding more fields to your lead capture form, consider a multi step experience. The first step is name, email, phone which are all required. The next steps are optional and ask questions that allow you to segment in your CRM. For example, are you B2B or B2C company? What's your revenue range? What are you most interested in using the CRM for? Make sure all questions are drop downs, and most importantly are connected to the matching fields in your CRM for easy tagging. Then have email nurtures set up that speak directly to the audience segment they were filtered into. You'll have to choose a priority if they fall into several segmentations. Happy segmenting!

“Know your data”, crucial to understand the availability, accuracy and accountability of the data residing which today is been done by data marts, data classification/tagging, etc so that we have a customer 360 view, lot of tools or system your modules are available. This definitely leads to built personas as per business/service requirements.

Segmenting prospects/leads/customers is always a complex operation. You would always need a system to give you flexibility of data selection for a customize segmentation. Too many segmentation is also unmanageable. Strategic approach is very useful in terms of what is your target segment. Leadog.io is a great app to try out for a simplistic approach on segmentation and an amazing outreach platform.

Once you have defined your customer cohorts using your analytics data it’s important to prioritise based on the size of the commercial opportunity. For example, marketing activity targeted at your high spenders over your lapsed customers. Use automations across your marketing channels such as email, SMS, push, paid media and direct mail. The content should be personalised as every opportunity with consistent brand messaging across all touch points in the customer journey. Once you have that in place test, test, test!

If you weren't able to segment your audience on the way into the CRM, a survey is a great way to segment them after. What I like to do is wrap segmenting and profiling questions into a survey of value based questions so we all get a lot out of the effort. People love to talk about themselves and share advice, so my favorite subject line for a survey is "can I get your advice" Then offer an incentive for completing the survey. Send it out a few times a year to un-segmented people and get the best results.

In my experience and based on my recent studies, leveraging data-driven insights is crucial for customer retention. Analysing customer behaviour and preferences allows you to customize your offerings and communications to better meet their needs. For instance, Amazon's recommendation system uses data to suggest products based on a customer's browsing and purchase history, demonstrating the power of personalization in keeping customers engaged and coming back for more. I agree, but I would also emphasize the importance of seamless omnichannel experiences. Customers now expect a consistent and convenient journey across all touchpoints, whether online or in-store. Providing this level of consistency can significantly enhance loyalty.