How to Use Segmentation to Increase E-Commerce Sales

We're deep into the age of relationship marketing to where every little detail and touch point that a customer experiences with a brand they expected to be personalized for them. What’s not directly relevant for them, they will ignore. It's vital that you keep this in mind when you set up the pages, funnels, ads and content of your eCommerce site. Every part should cater to your specific customers; new and returning. This even goes beyond customer groups: each individual customer should feel like they are having a conversation with your brand and they interact if you want the maximum results. There are plenty of proven tricks and tools to do this that are really easy to implement and try right away. It all sounds complicated but it’s not!

Try a few of these methods and tools and make your website a customer segmentation machine and watch your sales increase:

Understand your buyer personas or target audience.

First things first, understanding your target audience or buyer persona is really important. Your sales and marketing team can brainstorm and come up with a few buyer persona profiles to target your best customers. This will serve as a baseline for what you set up segmentation-wise on your site and off. You can get very specific in the details down: demographics, their interests, location, where they are online, where they get their information; the more detailed you can get, the better it is. This will help you determine and guide what kind of content, design, messaging, and offers you create that will convert your target customers the best.

Use an ad retargeting tool.

This is probably one of the easiest ways to make your eCommerce site heavily segmented to better sell to customers: use an ad retargeting tool like AdRoll that will capture data of your incoming visitors who show interest in your site. When they leave your site, AdRoll will retarget them with a specific ad based on their behavior on your site. For example, if someone came in and checked out your awesome snowshoes, AdRoll will show them an ad on Facebook of those snowshoes and an offer to get them back to your site. This will ensure that you're not wasting your ad money on visitors that will leave and never come back. It helps you actually bring them back with offers that are specific to them and are more likely to convert them.

Vary content and offers based on your customer.

Tools are getting so specific, you can actually vary the content that you present on any of the pages on your site to better target the customer who's coming in to view your site. You can change images, headlines, body text, CTAs, and colors based on data to better appeal to the customer on your site using a tool like Optimizely. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds, you set this up on your site very simply and Optimizely will help determine the best decisions on what to display to better convert on each of the pages of your site. This way when someone comes into your site you're offering a specific experience for them that is much more likely to get them to move to the next point in the process.

Create content that appeals to your customer segments specifically.

A good general rule of thumb is create free content that appeals to your customer segments specifically. Good content appeals to customer groups, answers their top questions, and provides solutions to their biggest problems. Make it a point to display this info centrally so you can engage customers and dispel any friction in the sales process. It’s good to cover all customer groups interests, concerns, and questions in your blogs and posts as well.

Display segmented sales and offers.

Increase sales by creating unique and specific sales and offers for different segments of customers. You can use Beamer to present different offers on any page of your site. Beamer is a news feed seamlessly integrates into your site. New and returning customers can explore it by clicking on a “What’s New” tab in your navigation or an icon. You can create updates for new products, news, sales, and discounts. You can add photos, videos, GIFs, and actionable CTAs. With Beamer, you can segment these updates so users see the most relevant sales, offers, and products for them based on their past behavior, demographics, location, and language. This way, you can focus on what appeals to them most and get higher conversion rates.

Create landing pages that are specific to customer groups and specific customers.

Don’t just stop at updates. If you’re running ads for specific segments and driving traffic to your site, make sure you have corresponding landing pages as well. When customers get to your site, especially through an ad targeted to them, there should be a personalized landing page with products and offers relevant to what you already know about them. You should be specific about products, copy, design, offers, images, etc. For example, if customers in warm locations click on an ad for your upcoming summer collection, the products you offer and the copy should reflect your target audience compared to someone coming in for your static collection from a different area. Most fashion e-Commerce sites are brilliant at landing page segmentation!

Customer segmentation sounds really detailed, tech-y, and overwhelming, however, using these principles and with a few of these tools automated on your website you can sit and watch your sales grow. Try Beamer on your site for an easy way to segment and engage your target customers.