No one wants to feel like a number. But every time you send an irrelevant text, email, or offer, that’s exactly how 77% of your customers feel. Customers are increasingly expecting personalized experiences from brands and businesses, and you can deliver on their expectations with the help of customer segmentation tools.
Picture it: You send a reminder to a customer to reorder a product when they’re probably running low.
Or you email a coupon to a customer for an item they were looking at on your website but didn’t buy.
Or you create a campaign exclusively for luxury watch collectors.
When you know your audience, you can speak directly to them and cater to their needs. And in return, they’re more likely to hear you loud and clear — and hopefully respond back.
Let’s explore the best customer segmentation software that will help you personalize experiences and strengthen every campaign.
Contents:
Why Are Customer Segmentation Tools Essential?
What Are the Best Customer Segmentation Tools on the Market?
What Are Key Features to Look for in Customer Segmentation Tools?
How Can Customer Segmentation Tools Drive Business Growth?
What Are Some Best Practices for Implementing Customer Segmentation Tools?
Choosing the Right Customer Segmentation Tools for Your Business
Why Are Customer Segmentation Tools Essential?
Sending mass messages to your entire audience sounds efficient, but it’s not always the best way to be seen and heard. Mass messages lack the personal touch and relevancy that turn heads and inspire action.
But when you focus on the needs and interests of a select few — a segment of your audience — you’ll have a better chance of earning their attention. You’re meeting them where they are and giving them what they need.
Customer segmentation tools do the heavy lifting for you. Rather than pouring through data and finding common denominators among customers, your segmentation tools can sniff out these shared elements and help you tailor your message accordingly.
This helps you scale your personalized marketing without sacrificing results. Plus, it helps you find connections and patterns between customers you might not have known to look for, giving you more ways to segment and personalize your outreach.
What Are the Best Customer Segmentation Tools on the Market?
Customer segmentation software has grown in sophistication over the years. Here are our top picks for the best customer segmentation tools to drive your strategy.
| Customer Segmentation Tool | Best for | Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Meltwater Customer Intelligence | Unique Segmentation |
|
| Kissmetrics | Multi-channel Segmentation |
|
| Mailchimp | Email Segmentation |
|
| Survicate | Survey Segmentation |
|
| Userpilot | Onboarding & Usage Segmentation |
|
| Heap | Behavior Segmentation |
|
| Google Analytics | Marketing Segmentation |
|
1. Meltwater Consumer Intelligence
Meltwater’s billions of real-time data points help you understand your audience in new and innovative ways. Our consumer intelligence suite uses a combination of social listening, AI, data science, and natural language processing to learn more about your audience’s online conversations and what they mean.
While traditional segmentation relies on what you already know about your audience, Meltwater helps you find hidden connections and questions you haven’t thought to ask. It looks objectively at trends and patterns in data to open doors to new insights.
So yes, it’s possible for your beverage brand to find people who also love pizza and true-crime documentaries. Do a brand cross-over, or craft a campaign that shows how you can be the beverage of choice for an epic Friday night at home.
2. Kissmetrics
If you’re new to audience segmentation, Kissmetrics makes it easy to get started. This customer segmentation software tracks user behavior across multiple channels so you can tie their actions to your marketing success.
One of Kissmetrics’ strongest suits is its ability to show your most effective marketing channels. Today’s consumers interact with businesses through multiple touchpoints, making it harder to trace their customer journey and attribute conversions to the right channel.
Kissmetrics keeps track of all of your touchpoints for you, from social media to email to websites and landing pages, so you can connect with your various audience segments where they’re most likely to engage.
3. Mailchimp
Known for its powerful email marketing capabilities, Mailchimp also serves as a top customer segmentation tool. Focused solely on email marketing segments, companies can segment their list based on user behaviors and other factors to avoid those mass email blasts that no one reads.
Mailchimp offers multiple ways to segment your email subscribers, including:
- Contact details
- How your contacts were acquired (e.g., data added, sign-up source)
- Email and SMS activity
- E-commerce activity
- Likelihood of purchasing again
- Customer lifetime value
- Custom engagements
- Conversations activity
- Website engagement
- Landing page activity
- SurveyMonkey activity
The customer segmentation software’s intuitive interface makes it easy to filter your segmentation options and deploy email campaigns in minutes. You can combine up to five conditions per segment for even better targeting.
4. Survicate
Customer segmentation tools aren’t just for personalizing marketing messages. They can also prove valuable when you want to collect insights and feedback from customers. That’s the strength of Survicate, a customer segmentation software that focuses on segmenting audiences for feedback purposes.
Survicate collects various types and forms of feedback, including Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES). Each of these formats supports different questions and requires different targeting options.
For example, you might target customers who left negative feedback on the last survey to see if their next experience improved. Or you might send a special survey to new customers to learn more about their first impressions. Survicate takes the lead in segmenting your audience so you receive feedback from the right people.
As results trickle in, you can view real-time updates and analytics to see how your brand measures up.
5. Userpilot
Ideal for SaaS companies, Userpilot tracks how customers set up and use their software tools. For customers who never fully complete the onboarding or set up the tool and never use it again, you risk losing their recurring revenue. Userpilot data can mitigate churn by helping you provide resources and assistance in timely moments.
Touted as a product growth platform, Userpilot segments your new customers based on how they’re setting up, implementing, and using your SaaS products. You can guide users through setting up the platform and start reaping all its benefits. Segmentation features focus on user roles and use cases. If onboarding stalls or certain features aren’t adopted, you can see where users are in the journey and be proactive about helping them.
You can also segment customers to send in-app feedback surveys. Learn more about how they’re using the tool, their experiences, and the challenges they face so you can continuously improve your software and retain more customers.
6. Heap
With customer journeys becoming less linear and harder to track, it’s essential for businesses to understand the variety of actions customers take to convert. Focused on digital journeys, Heap tracks every event, including swipes, clicks, taps, page views, and more, to offer more insights into their customer experiences.
No matter how your customers find you, Heap tracks their end-to-end journeys. This helps you understand how your customers interact with your website, products, and content. It sniffs out areas of friction and detects trends you might not be looking for, all with the goal of helping you increase conversions.
7. Google Analytics
If you’re new to customer segmentation and want to explore more of its benefits and uses, Google Analytics is a good place to start. Backed by Google data (which is undoubtedly valuable), this free tool tracks website activity and can help you learn more about your audience.
To access data that’s useful for segmentation, log into your Google Analytics account and navigate to the User Explorer menu. Here, you can filter by demographics, interests, geographic regions, behaviors, technology, and more.
These metrics measure users during their sessions on your website. They examine individual users rather than aggregate user data, which can be helpful when you want to personalize their experiences. This data can serve as the foundation for your audience segmentation strategy.
What Are Key Features to Look for in Customer Segmentation Tools?
The features and functions of your customer segmentation tools can make or break their effectiveness. Key features to look for include:
- Data integration. These tools should be able to crunch large volumes of customer data from multiple sources and provide deep insights into buying behavior, preferences, and trends.
- Advanced segmentation criteria. Effective segmentation often goes several layers deep, so make sure your tools allow you to hone your targeting and truly personalize the experience.
- Automation and personalization options. Automatically segmenting customers based on triggers saves time and resources, plus it creates an always-on segmentation strategy.
Every customer segmentation software looks and works a little differently. Take a test drive or request a demo to learn more about their inner workings before implementing it in your strategy.
How Can Customer Segmentation Tools Drive Business Growth?
Customers come to a business for myriad reasons, based on unique challenges, interests, or values. By grouping customers by need or other criteria, businesses can tailor their messaging to each group’s specific needs and preferences.
Doing so allows businesses to drive growth through several avenues:
Optimized marketing campaigns
John Wannamaker’s famous words about wasting half of everything he spends on marketing hit hard. No one wants to spend more than they have to, which is why customer segmentation offers an attractive option.
By learning more about who you’re talking to and what they need, you have a better chance of immediately appealing to them and giving them a reason to act now. Optimized marketing means spending less per campaign to generate the same or better results.
Higher conversion rates
With better marketing, higher conversion rates come naturally. Personalized offers and content are more likely to resonate than generic messages, which means more sales and more opportunities to nurture those relationships.
Increased customer loyalty
When customers do business with a company that “gets” them, that company stands out for all the right reasons. Customers aren’t quick to forget those great experiences, which means they’re more likely to do business with you in the future versus a competitor.
What Are Some Best Practices for Implementing Customer Segmentation Tools?
If you’re ready to implement a customer segmentation tool, know that your marketing is about to change for the better. But to reap all the expected benefits that segmentation offers, you’ll want to apply a few best practices:
- Identify relevant customer segments. What’s relevant to one business might not matter to another. Think carefully about how to best segment your customers that will drive results.
- Create actionable segments based on behavioral data. There are millions of shared details among customers, but we suggest starting with behavioral data. Action results in revenue.
- Measure and refine your segmentation strategies. As you build your segmentation skills, keep looking for ways to improve your strategy for better results. New segments mean new opportunities!
Now you’re set for success! The next priority is to choose a customer segmentation software that will help you on your journey to marketing greatness.
Discover customer segmentation examples and learn from B2B and retail examples.
Choosing the Right Customer Segmentation Tools for Your Business
The best customer segmentation tools align with your business goals, are easy to use and scale, and work the way you do. Many of the tools on our list will integrate with existing systems, allowing you to start segmenting your audience and enjoying the benefits.
We invite you to explore Meltwater as your customer segmentation software. Meltwater’s expansive data, always-on capabilities, and power of AI can help you find unique audience segments that don’t immediately meet the eye. Meltwater monitors online conversations and merges mentions, behaviors, actions, and intent to help you personalize the customer experience.
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