Create Customer Segments

One of the most important steps in identifying your most valuable customers is creating customer segments. You can break customers down into several groups:

• Audience types
• Journey stage
• Product/service categories
• Industries
• Personas
  
  

It’s helpful to think of this tasty acronym when identifying valuable customers: PIE (Potential, Importance, Ease). Look at the potential to increase visitor engagement through personalisation (as well as what the potential ROI will be by doing so). You can gauge the importance of a segment based on the number of contacts within it. Finally, it should be easy to evaluate whether a customer is part of a particular segment or not.

Use the Right Tools

It becomes much easier to figure out who your most valuable customers are when you have the right tools. Sitecore, the customer experience platform, includes the Experience Database, which indexes contacts and interactions, as well as a segmentation engine, which divides customers into groups. These two components help you determine what your most valuable customers are doing online, and then you can segment them accordingly.

When your customers take action online, you can search for it within Sitecore’s database. This option gives you a greater insight into what your customers are doing. For example, maybe your most valuable customers always like your content on Facebook. Perhaps that group would respond best to Facebook ads.

It’s easier to figure out your most valuable customers when you have the right tools.

The segmentation engine works quickly and accurately to give you the information that you need. Simply type in a query, and the segmentation engine will deliver a list of results that fit those criteria. You don’t need to do any coding or any programming; the segmentation engine does all the work for you, so you just need to review the lists.

Once you know who your most valuable customers are, you can personalise content accordingly. You can also set up rules to automate the process of segmenting customers and tailoring messages. When you feel as though you’ve established more rules than might be manageable, Sitecore has a solution.

Sitecore leverages machine learning to simplify and automate tasks. For example, if you’ve created dozens of rules to segment customers, Sitecore Cortex will group those types of customers into clusters based on their purchasing ability. You can then create rules to customise content based on the attributes common to cluster members. It’s the best of both worlds; you don’t have to spend time figuring out which customer belongs in which group, and which type of content would resonate with that person.

Once you’ve segmented customers into groups or clusters, you can use Sitecore to serve up personalised content to them at the right time, when they’re in the right place, ensuring a fantastic customer experience.

Enlighten: Helping You Implement Sitecore at Your Company

Enlighten is proud to be a Sitecore Gold partner. We’re experts at implementing Sitecore at firms; our clients achieve high ROI and are able to improve the customer experience for their own users. Interested in learning more about how to identify your most valuable customers and elevate the customer experience?  Read our User Experience Guidelines white paper!