Research indicates that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when offered personalised experiences (source: Epsilon).

You’d be able to compete with brands making customers feel like they’re a priority, not just a number. Existing customers would stick by you. Prospects would seek you out. Organic growth would come as you increased sales and boosted your reputation.

Achieve this with hybrid segmentation. Discover how it helps you unlock the full potential of your customer data, helping you accelerate growth and secure your business’ future.

You’ve probably found a lack of strategic focus in the business because different parts of your company are pulling in different directions. This is the consequence of having separate, parallel survey and database segmentations.

What’s more, when you use survey and database segmentation in isolation, you’re battling against significant limitations:

• Survey segmentations aren’t tagged onto your customer database, so you can’t tailor your propositions to the right customers using the right message. This also makes marketing initiatives harder to prioritise and measure success.
• Database segmentations have little understanding of the ‘why’ behind customer behaviour. You can’t create engaging and relevant content, anticipate consumers’ changing needs, or address the potential customers’ rejection of your current propositions.

Consequently, you can’t gain the insight needed to drive growth because you don’t know:

• Which segments to target to maximise profit.
• What new products and concepts to focus on.
• The most effective language and imagery for engagement.
• Which media to use to reach your target segments.
• How to personalise your web pages.
• How to optimise the position of your current products.

Hybrid segmentation helps you answer these questions in detail. Strategies to improve your existing customer relationships and target new prospects are much more effective, igniting rapid progress. Let’s look at why in more detail.

Hybrid segmentation combines your most useful data assets (customer, survey and third-party marketing data) and a more psychographic understanding of the whole market to create a high-level view of your customers.

You gain segments that accurately reflect the needs, desires and motivations of consumers, as well as the state of the market. The segments can be attributed to your database using the latest machine-learning algorithms, enabling precise personalisation at scale.

The beauty of hybrid segmentation is that it is operational across the business. Your teams all have access to the same insight and can coordinate on activations effectively, facilitating wider strategic success.

Discover the process of hybrid segmentation in our comprehensive ebook.

We cover the seven benefits and how to ensure you can deliver these for your business.

Hybrid segmentation can be used in myriad ways to accelerate progress. We reveal how businesses are using it operationally to drive different outcomes, all of which contribute to growth.

 

1. Increase sales

Hybrid segmentation takes the guesswork out of product and service proposition development. You can design offerings that speak to specific customers – including those who are valuable but underserved – making your products and services more attractive to existing customers and those in the market with similar needs and motivations.

A leading travel company discovered this when developing its new Holiday Tours proposition. Using hybrid segmentation, it uncovered a valuable segment: travellers who craved authentic, culture-filled tours that were flexible and off the beaten track. This was also in line with global emerging trends, signalling a big opportunity to meet consumer demand.

The company built its Tours proposition entirely around this segment. And because it was tagged on its database, it could share its proposition with customers who were likely to take up flexible tours. Razor-sharp product positioning resulted in a 215% uptake of the new Tours product when compared to other holiday products.

This shows how hybrid segmentation can help you increase sales with propositions that are well-positioned for your target segments.

 

2. Boost customer retention

There’s little sweeter than finding a brand you can trust and want to stay with for the long term. No more shopping around. You save time and effort, and perhaps even money, as your loyalty is rewarded with exclusive offers and promotions.

So, customers want to find a brand they can be loyal to. The key to driving customer loyalty, and thus customer retention, is effective personalisation. First, this requires a 360-degree view of consumers’ individual needs, desires and motivations.

Hybrid segmentation unlocks this capability by connecting what customers do with why they do it. It also tells you who those customers are (age, gender, job role, etc), where they are, how they prefer to interact with your brand, and when they’re most likely to buy.

You can attribute this insight to individual segments on your database and use it on a practical level (e.g. send segments emails that are tailored precisely to their needs and distributed when they’re more likely to read them).

By sending your messages to the right people at the right time, and not just everyone on your database, you can maximise the value of your content. And crucially, you become more effective at retaining customers, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can raise profits by 25-95% (source: Harvard Business Review).

A leading travel company recently used hybrid segmentation to predict the personality, needs and feelings of its Flexible Tours segment. This understanding helped it enhance its brochures with personalised messaging, specifically targeted toward its segment.

The ROI of these brochures more than covered the cost of the segmentation itself. And the brochures were an important step in helping the company connect with its customers on a deeper level, driving customer retention.

 

3. Be more competitive

Customers don’t just want relevant and timely content. As soon as they interact with your brand, they want an experience that satisfies them, feels easy, and surpasses their needs. This includes in-store shopping experiences. Brands that can deliver on this will stand out for all the right reasons and fuel growth. Brands that can’t do this will fall behind and struggle to survive.

A leading Swedish retailer showed us how it’s done. Using hybrid segmentation, the company identified key consumer motivations, drivers and barriers to purchase when shopping in store.

It then developed a customer journey map for two segments that had distinctive shopping styles. For example, Segment A preferred exciting and inspirational shopping experiences. The retailer built a customer journey map for this segment and then implemented it as a variant within one of its popular stores.

By comparing footfall in that store to another store that was implementing a different customer journey variant, this retailer could identify the most desirable type of shopper journey and apply this to the rest of its stores. You can use hybrid segmentation to the same effect to improve your shopper experiences, helping you stand out in a competitive market, attract new customers and grow.

 

4. Build high-performing teams

Survey and database segmentation used in isolation results in misaligned teams that pull in different directions, hampering their overall performance.

Under the unified framework that hybrid segmentation provides, teams are pulled together. They can share the same information and coordinate their activities so everyone’s contributing to the same goal.

This improves their overall efficiency, facilitates job satisfaction, and helps you create high-performing teams that directly contribute to business growth. A US study revealed that connected teams demonstrate a 21% increase in profitability over their less-connected counterparts (source: Gallup).

Let’s look at it on a basic level. With hybrid segmentation, your Insight team will be able to explain to your Innovation team what the segments are. Your Innovation team can then create a service or product proposition designed around a specific segment. Then, your eCRM team can personalise their communications to the target segment using the new proposition.

Outcomes become more valuable because every action taken is a step towards achieving your wider strategic goal. As a resource, you’re maximising the value of your teams, ensuring that their work will deliver, rather than having them waste time experimenting with things that may not be profitable.

We’ve demonstrated how hybrid segmentation can help you grow your business. But to achieve these outcomes, there has to be a significant shift within your organisation.

Hybrid segmentation is the starting point of a new way of working. This has to be communicated from the top. You need to be its champion, communicating the value of hybrid segmentation and its significance for the business.

When your teams are united through this shared understanding, you can use your data to its fullest potential. Research suggests that data-driven organisations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers. They’re also six times as likely to retain customers and 19 times more likely to be profitable (source: McKinsey & Company).