It’s time for marketers to forget about chasing the customers who are never going to buy the products. But this is time for us to pinpoint customers those who do and getting them to spend more, is the best way to tough out of recession.
Yes…Segmentation studies are very important to identify your existing customers those who can spend more. Following are 10 bite-sized tips for successful segmentation.
1 – Don’t do it unless everyone agrees it is needed. Its vital to get whole company buy-in from the outset as the implications extend beyond the marketing department.
2 – Don’t expect your usual research agencies to be able to cope with segmentation. These studies require different skills.
3 – The data won’t give you all the answer. It is critical that you have a hypothesis about how some of the segments might look so that you can judge the output against them.
4 – Qualitative and quantitative segmentations rarely match perfectly. While broad groups identified in qualitative research should emerge, the nuances of aualitative segmentation will often lost.
5 – There is no such thing as the “statistically right answer”. Different software and methodology produce different answers.
6 – Segmentation is as much an art as a science. Politics and pragmatism will often have as much of an affect on the solution as statistics.
7 – If you need to segment more than one group, make sure that they link together. The only way anyone is going to understand and embrace a segmentation is if it is simple and useable.
8 – Be prepared to delete lots of respondents. Survey data relies on producing an overall average score. And while we would hope that all respondents answer the surveys correctly, the reality is that many don’t.
9 – If you want staff to encourage with the segments, you have to bring them to life. Anything that moves is better than anything that is static, and 3D is better than 2D.
10- The segmentation solution is only the start of the journey, not thenend. Segmentation should only ever be a tool, not an end product in its own right.
Ragulan Tharmakulasingam 