
Ask the Experts
Wednesday February 24th (9AM PST), Tamara Grominsky, VP of Strategic Growth at Unbounce, will be answering your questions on customer segmentation. Ask away!
Wednesday February 24th (9AM PST), Tamara Grominsky, VP of Strategic Growth at Unbounce, will be answering your questions on customer segmentation. Ask away!
Where am I?
In Product Marketing Alliance you can ask and answer questions and share your experience with others!
I would love to hear about best practice for running segmentation exercises for the first time. How do you go about finding the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and operationalizing across the various teams?
The most important thing to consider is removing any and all bias from the exercise. Identifying your ideal customer segments is not about opinion, but should be rooted in data.
I recommend an approach that takes into consideration both qualitative and quantitative research.
First, leverage the data (geographic, demographic, behavioral, etc) you have about your existing customers , those who have purchased from you in the past, and those who come to our product but don't end up purchasing to gain a better understand of who you are attracting and retaining today.
Then dig deeper into their performance metrics to see which of those segments have the highest positive impact on your business - you want to look out for metrics like conversion rate, lifetime value and churn rate.
If you're taking a data-based approach it will be easier to bring other teams and stakeholders along, and to get buy-in on your recommended segments. Make sure you're building artifacts that can be used by teams across the company to apply your segment research to their day-to-day work. I recommend a tool like a Segment Profile, which is similar to a persona, but includes more quantitative data than a traditional persona might.
For a B2B product with social impact, how important is segmenting by the key motivator (as in 'solve problem' or 'give back')? Which of these segments is likely to bring the most loyal customers?
Unfortunately I don't have the perfect answer for you Andre, as it will really depend on your specific product and customer base.
However, what I will say is that this is absolutely the right question to be asking, and completing some segmentation research will help you get answers.
When building your segments, it's important to prioritize groups that you can actually identify both out in the market, and in your customer base, using the data available. I'd recommend that you focus your segments on more tangible groups based on geographic and demographic info (for B2B, this might be business size/revenue and job title) first, and then during your qualitative research phase you can identify which motivators and positioning would resonate best for each segment. That's most likely when you would go deeper on your question above.
I'm working on a B2B product that has use cases across several roles (e.g. content marketers, product managers, DevOps). After you've defined your segments, how would you recommend prioritizing them?
Great question Abby! Based on the info above, I'm going to assume that you've already identified these core segments and validated that they are high performing. (Validating and comparing each segment's performance is a critical step to helping to prioritize whether your business should be focusing on them).
If that's the case, then I'd recommend you look outwards to finalize the prioritization of your segments. Essentially you want to confirm that you could win the market should you choose to prioritize it. To do this, you might consider three areas of research:
Hi Tamara. I read that a survey from MailChimp found segmented campaigns had open rates 14.31% higher than non-segmented campaigns. I'm keen to improve my own email campaigns and see segmentation as the perfect opportunity to do so. But, what would be your key piece of advice to a PMM planning to segmentation for their email campaigns?
I'm so happy to hear you're keen to implement segmented email campaigns - I think they are super effective!
If you have existing email programs in place - for example, onboarding flows or product adoption flows - then I'd recommend you start by choosing one segment that you want to experiment with. You'll want to run your generic campaign next to your segmented one to see if the segmented one improves performance.
Gather all of the current research and insights you have about this segment and identify where you might need to know more. If you're going to build segmented onboarding flows you will need to understand why that segment chose your product, what value they want to receive, and which features will decrease their time to value. Then tweak (or completely re-write) your existing generic flow to represent this segmented perspective - leveraging hyper relevant messaging, sequencing the order of features you introduce, and providing appropriate resources.
If your experiment is successful, then you can roll out the same process to your other customer segments!
So many amazing questions here, I'll give them a shot!
How often do you update your customer segments at Unbounce? Given it’s a continual process, I don’t want to leave it too long and work from irrelevant data!
There isn't a magic timeframe that I'd recommend updating/overhauling your segments. At Unbounce, we do large-scale updates of our segments if there is a substantial change within the business, like the introduction of a new product line or entry into a new market.
However, we are in a process of continual optimization of our existing customer segments. As we learn more about the customers that fall within our segments, we deepen our understanding of what motivates this group, how they perceive value and what tactics and strategies work to convert and retain them. We use data like win-loss interviews, surveys and NPS to ensure we're up-to-date and have our finger on the pulse of our segments.
Hi Tamara. In your opinion, what are the key things every product marketer needs to do to get the most out of customer segmentation?
Hey Tamara, hope you’re good! Please can you outline the difference between product segmentation and market segmentation? Thanks!
I’ve been advised to draw data from multiple sources whilst completing customer segmentation - are you able to recommend any go-to-tools or resources you’ve found to be effective?
Hi Tamara, my org has experienced an increase in churn rate, and given the current climate, we’re conscious of the long-term implications this could have. Could you suggest ways in which we can use customer segmentation in our efforts to retain our existing clientele? Thanks so much for your help.
Hiya Tamara! What would you consider to be the minimum number of customers required to build an effective segment? Thanks in advance! 😊
Hi Tamara, I was wondering if you could offer an impartial perspective! My business partner and I have very different perspectives about using demographic segmentation; he’s of the opinion that using demographics will help target our customers more effectively. However, I’m of the mindset that any problematic data could lead to us making unreliable assumptions, reducing the accuracy of our methods. Am I being short-sighted? What’s your stance, and do you have a preferred method when it comes to segmenting your customers?
Hi Tamara. How can I establish whether the segment I’m targeting is over-serviced?