Segmentation in marketing automation is dividing a target audience into distinct groups or segments based on specific characteristics, behaviors, or preferences. These segments are then used to design strategies around them and offer them more personalized and targeted marketing messages, offers, or experiences.

Marketing Automation (MA) tools will allow marketers to segment users based on their attributes. It provides segmentation capabilities to help marketers better understand their audience and provide them predictive insights as well as to tailor their communication strategies accordingly.

Four types of segmentation are:

1. Demographic – Segmenting the data based on the person’s attributions such as Age, Gender, Job Title, Job level, Job Function, Industry, etc.
2. Behavioral – Segmenting the data based on the person’s activity such as email opens, email clicks, form fills, page visits. Largely based on interest in certain products.
3. Psychographic – Enables marketers to learn to position their products so that compatible customers can “discover” them. Matching the right customer based on customer attitudes and lifestyles. It’s largely a market research method that MA tools can help target interests – designing strategies around that.
4. Geographic – This segmentation divides the audience based on geographic location, such as country, region, city, or postal code.

How AI can help in segmentation

Given the amount of data used in effective segmentation, it can be somewhat laborious and time-consuming – with the potential for error

AI can improve both speed, efficiency and quality (if your data is properly structured), it can gather information and refine data from multiple sources and put it together to generate targeted segments.

Features to consider when selecting AI-based segmentation tool

• A focus on data unification
• Visualization and report distribution
• Customization
• Scalability

Some Tools that can be handy for AI-based segmentation :

• Peak.ai
• Optimove
• Glance

In addition

Utilizing various ABM tools that captures user behavior and expands the target account list with relevant engaged accounts utilizing various signals and sources. Ultimately this allows us to reach out to more relevant leads with more accurate messaging.

Benefits of segmentation:

• Improving campaign performance – Segmentation will improve the performance of marketing campaigns by helping to target the right people at the right time. Learn more about your audience and better tailor the messaging to their preferences and needs.
• Improved personaliztion: Optimized segments can help you develop personalized messaging to support your overall marketing and communication strategy.
• Optimized cadence: Optimizing send frequency utilizing behaviorial segmentation helps you identify which users are most engaged – you can target the most engaged without sacrificing the rest of your list.

In conclusion

Per The State of Marketing 2023 released by Hubspot, email open rates have gone down by 12% across the various industries – personalization can help stop the decline of basic engagement metrics like the open rate.

It’s important to remember, 83% of users are willing to share their data to get personalized engagement and Brands using segmentation and personalization are generating higher ROI compared to those who are not using it.