How to Segment Your Audience in 2022 (And Why You Should!)

One of the best ways to build rapport with your audience and secure more sales is with customer segmentation. Essentially, segmenting is the process of dividing existing customers and qualified leads based on their unique interests, goals, and pain points.

When you understand what visitors expect from your products and content, it’s easier to create laser-focused marketing, which will help you drive conversions. Many advantages come with this strategy, and there are plenty of ways to segment your visitors into ultra-personalized lists.

Today, I want to share several powerful segmenting benefits you need to know. I’ll also share some of the best ways you can use this strategy to start building more robust lead lists in 2022.

Are you ready? Let’s begin!

Benefits of Segmenting Your Audience

The first and most apparent benefit of segmentation is you get to learn about your target audience. The more you know about your visitors, the better chance you have at turning them into customers. Similarly, if you know about the buying habits of existing customers, you can convince them to come back and make repeat purchases.

When it comes to email marketing, this technique can help you boost your click-through rate and sales. Research shows that segmenting your leads results in around 14.31% more email opens, which can make a big difference in your overall conversion rate.

Across all platforms, customer segmentation allows you to create personalized offers and marketing material. For instance, an online pet shop might send their customers newsletters tailored to the pets each person owns. If someone owns cats, they are much more likely to engage with a newsletter focused on cat-themed products and articles.

When you consider that 59% of shoppers say that marketing emails influence their purchasing decisions, it’s easy to see how sharing personalized content can lead to more sales.

Segmenting is also an excellent way to gather customer feedback and create a better user experience for all of your visitors. If you take the time to divide your leads, you can find ways to fine-tune your marketing and design for each subset of customers, which will likely result in improved customer satisfaction.

Now that you can see the benefits of segmenting your leads and customers, let’s go over a few ways to segment your audience in 2022.

Send Email Surveys

Just because someone already signed up for your email list, that doesn’t mean that you can’t find out what kind of content and offers they want to receive in the future. I’ve found that email surveys are a powerful way to encourage engagement and learn more about your customers.

There are pivotal moments throughout your funnel when you should send surveys for the purpose of segmentation. For starters, you should always include a brief feedback form with your welcome email. Welcome emails have an open rate of 82%, so there’s a good chance your new subscriber will click through and read what you have to say.

I also suggest sending subscribers a satisfaction survey a week after receiving your product or service. This is the perfect time to reach out because your company is still fresh in your customers’ minds.

If you’re able to connect with visitors at this critical moment, they are more likely to share information that you can use to personalize your future marketing efforts. When you consider that 4 out of 5 shoppers want more personalized content and offers, it’s easy to see how this segmenting strategy can yield significant results.

Let New Subscribers Choose Their Preferences

Another way to segment your audience is to ask visitors or subscribers to choose their preferences when they engage with your brand. On the email marketing side of things, you should include one or two optional questions on your signup form that give users the option to choose what type of content they want to receive.

Let’s revisit the pet store example we mentioned earlier. If the marketing team at this company wants to give their audience this option, they may ask subscribers what type of pets they own directly on the signup page. This will save them time later when it comes time to put them on the list that most closely matches their needs.

You can also enable other marketing tools, like push notifications, on your site. The same rules we mentioned apply here as well. The popups that encourage users to allow push alerts from your site should also include an easy way for visitors to choose their preferences. The option to choose whether they want to receive content, promotions, or both, can have a sizable impact on your click-through rate.

Get Involved with the Community

Engaging with communities on social media and in your comments section can also help you segment your audience. A big part of segmentation involves understanding the personas of the people who visit your site.

In other words, what are their goals, interests, and pain points? The more you know about these different categories, the stronger personas you can create. As a result, you have a better chance of connecting with your segmented lists because you know what problems they want to solve or what goals they hope to achieve.

Social media is an excellent place to find communities and learn about potential customers. Believe it or not, over 51% of the global population uses social media, so it’s safe to assume that your target audience is out there, just waiting for you to find them.

I suggest looking for groups on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. These two websites are jam-packed with people talking about very specific topics in standalone groups. If you can get involved with these groups and build rapport with the long-time members, you can learn a ton of new information about your audience segments.

Twitter and Instagram are also excellent places to engage with communities focused on your industry. When you schedule posts, make sure to include hashtags used by these groups so you can start a discussion. Don’t forget to drop in and talk to the people commenting and sharing your posts. The more time you spend with these people, the more chances you’ll have to refine your buyer personas.

Review Your On-Site Analytics

Finally, you should always check your on-site analytics for more information about your customer segments. We’ve learned so much by looking at our Google Analytics and determining how people engage with our site.

For example, if we see more users flocking to a specific subset of topics on our blog, we can usually learn more about their intent by tracking what they decide to do next. If a majority of users leave before placing an order or joining our lead list, we know that we need to do more to bridge the gap between the subtopic and our brand.

Sometimes this means publishing new content; other times, it could mean adding a new feature to an existing product. The way you use this information will depend on the size of your audience, your product catalog, and available resources.

Regardless of how much you can change right away, your analytics can help you shape your audience personas and properly segment your audience based on their unique interests.

Put it All Together

As you can see, all of the segmenting tips we provide work together. The questions on your signup form will determine the type of marketing surveys you send out. Furthermore, research in social media communities could lead to brand new blog topics, which directly impact what you can learn from your analytics.

The advice offered today is meant to help you design a framework that you can use to build top-notch customer personas for your business. Once you have these tools in place, you’ll find that it’s much easier to market to your audience and secure more sales.