One of the crucial weapons that businesses must have in their arsenal today is personalization! Personalization helps marketing, sales, and service teams deliver outstanding customer experiences and achieve the desired enterprise goals.
Right from delivering tailored recommendations and content offers to customizing the experience across all channels and devices throughout the entire customer journey, personalization has become highly ubiquitous in today’s customer-centric world!
One of the easiest ways to unveil the full potential of personalization is through the power of data! But according to Salesforce State of Marketing Report 2021,
Now, the key to getting the most out of these customer data sources is by bringing them all under one place! And we all know how Salesforce Customer Data Platform helps to do that! by creating unified profiles and establishing a single source of truth!
But does the work of CDP end with unified profile creation? Well, definitely not! CDP goes further and helps you establish greater business goals through ‘Segmentation’
Being a recognized Salesforce Partner, in this blog, we have explored everything about segmentation, and how you can leverage this feature in CDP for driving your business processes!
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So, without any delay, let’s get started!
What is Segmentation?
Every customer is unique with their own set of interests, motivations, and habits! Gone are the days when marketers went by the adage “Go big or go home”. To excel and achieve impressive returns in today’s competitive marketplace, you should “GO SPECIFIC!”
This is where audience segmentation in CDP steps in to help you with a targeted business experience!
A Customer Data Platform creates a unified and comprehensive profile for your customers based on their interaction with your common touch points like Sales, Service, and Marketing channels! Once this is done, you can filter, and segment customer profiles based on various key segmentation factors that impact your business goals!
Why should you Segment your Audiences?
In today’s competitive business landscape, audience segmentation will help you cut through the noise by delivering a hyper-personalized customer experience. Through segmentation, you can,
- Define your target audience
- Customize your message to resonate specifically with them
- Address specific needs that can help drive up conversion rates
- Build memorable relationships with your customers and earn their loyalty
- Bring in leads that accelerate your sales cycle.
How to perform Audience Segmentation with Salesforce CDP?
To get maximum results from your marketing efforts, you should choose the right segmentation factors based on the unique business goals you have set!
But marketers in general perform segmentation based on factors like geography, demography, behavior, psychography, and where the customers are in the buying journey!
Let’s take an example where you are running an online store that sells clothing and accessories. It will not be appropriate if you segment your audience based on geographyfor the launch of a new range of sports shoesin your e-store!
Because your audience may be interested in buying sports shoes despite the geographical location they live in!
So, the right way to segment your audience here can be done based on their behavioral aspects. Like the customers who purchased sportswear or products that are related to sports or have shown interest in buying sneakers and sports shoes!
Apart from Geography, Demography, Behavior, and Psychography, you can also segment your audience based on various other criteria! For instance, you can perform segmentation based on your unique business needs, the products you sell, or the email/social media campaigns you run for launching new products.
In all truth, the more segmentation layers you add, the more delineated your segments would be!
Now let’s see how segmentation works in real-time with an interesting use case!
Home Furnishing – A top-notch, end-to-end home furnishing solutions brand has recently implemented Salesforce CDP, and they have finished setting up unified profiles for their customers.
Home Furnishing is now excited to launch its new sofa couch range and they are all geared up to take its product to the right customers!
Cassandra, the marketer at Home Furnishing logs into Salesforce and starts working in the Salesforce CDP app. In the segmentation tab, she reviews the segments that are currently in her log.
She now wants to market the new soft couch range to Home Furnishing’s loyalty customers. So, Cassandra clicksNew and names her segment. She opts unified customer data as the data source. Followed by that she schedules how often this segment should be published or updated and clicks Save!
In CDP, Cassandra can filter with any attribute from her unified customer data.
For the sofa couch launch, she wants to target customers with specific criteria. They should be Home Furnishings’ loyalty members with a lifetime value of $100. And they should have browsed sofas on Home Furnishings’s website filter outcertain customers so that she can target the right audience!
If the customers have purchased any sofas in the last three days, or have an open case, they shouldn’t be included in the segment. The reason is, Home Furnishing’s marketing team will use this segment to send email campaigns, so they don’t want to include any customers who have received an email engagement in the last 7 days.
As Salesforce CDP is built on top easily configure her segments. She only needs to drag an attribute to the canvas, specify her criteria, and move on to the next filter. Its that simple, after a few clicks she can have all filters in one place.
Now you can see the difference in the size of her audience! If not through segmentation, Cassandra would’ve targeted around 20 million customers out of which nearly 3/4 of them would have found the launch message irrelevant!
Activating the audience using Salesforce CDP!
Cassandra is done with segmenting her audience and she has also scheduled how frequently she would like to publish her audience.
Now, it’s time to activate the audience!
Activation is the process of moving the segment to an activation target.
Here, Cassandra moves the segment to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, so she can use the segment in Journey Builder just in time for the Sofa Couch launch.
First, she creates a new activation from the Activation tab. Then, she chooses her segment and activation target- Salesforce Marketing Cloud!
Cassandra now chooses the contact points that should be a part of the activation, such as phone number, and email address.
Finally, publish your audience with Salesforce CDP!
Once done with all the configuration, Cassandra saves her activation. She can publish it to Marketing Cloud where her segments will be available as data extension. Now, she can use it in Home Furnishing’s new Sofa Couch launch journey to target the customers who have a high probability!
Thanks to the power of segmentation with Salesforce CDP! Targeting the right customers is now super easy!
Want to create stellar targeted marketing campaigns with Salesforce CDP, but not sure how? We can help!
It’s no doubt that CDP is a powerful segmentation engine!
But to get the most out of it and implement it the right way, you need a clear-cut strategy and best-in-class expertise!
As a trusted Salesforce Consulting Partner, our experts here at AVASOFT offer a unique combination of vertical expertise and innovation to help you implement the most appropriate CDP solutions for your project.
Whatever your marketing goals may be, we embrace a unique STEP Formula (Segmentation + Targeting = Positioning) to help you get surprising results and optimal results in your Salesforce CDP platform!
