Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is the process of dividing your potential customer base into subgroups based on a common set of characteristics such as behavior, psychographics, demographics, and customer type. 

It is an essential marketing discipline to find the customers who are looking and most need the products or services your company sells. To maximize the business value of audience segmentation, it is best to establish segmentation based on financial goals such as profits, sales, annual customer value or customer lifetime value.

The internet has made audience segmentation tools available that are accessible, trusted and often free to any business with a website.

Here are the 6 best audience segmentation tools to find customers that need you most.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics tool in the world and it’s free to anyone who owns a website. It’s designed for audience segmentation as the “add segment” tab is on every page. Segments can be build based on Users (New, Returning, Traffic Sources), Demographics, Geography, Device and Conversion Behavior. Google Analytics has Smart Goals where machine learning is used to examine dozens of signals about your website sessions to determine which of those are most likely to result in a conversion.

Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics was founded in 2008 by Neil Patel. It is highly ranked with a key difference vs Google Analytics in that it tracks people’s actions vs their page view behaviors. Kissmetric is an audience segmentation tool for marketers who are clear about their conversions. Kissmetric offers conversions funnels, A/B testing and can be integrated with popular ecommerce and email platforms. It’s very good for communication testing. Kissmetrics is for internet marketers likely to be focused on ecommerce. Kissmetrics has a 14-free trial with pricing that starts at $400/month.

Segment

Segment collects your customer data in one place and sends it anywhere.
This is helpful for organizations that want to enforce the same data standard across their enterprise. You can then power all your apps with the same data. Using this customer segmentation tool, you can even query your data in SQL for the most convenient experience. Segment also offers Personas, a new product built on the Segment platform. With Personas, you can make sense of your customer data and use it to deliver personal experiences throughout the customer journey. Segment’s pricing is similar to Kissmetrics.

Piwik PRO

Piwik PRO has a straightforward interface that any novice could dive into. This audience segmentation tool tracks visitors to your website and displays reports describing who they are and how they behave. The reports gathered using this tool demonstrate a better understanding of your audience. They are especially effective for a company that is looking to quickly be able to look and compare multiple websites. Piwik PRO is a good audience segmentation tool to consider if you’re experiencing reporting limitations with Google Analytics.

Optimove

Optimove is a Science-first Relationship Marketing Hub headquartered in Israel. It is used by hundreds of customer-centric businesses to drive measurable growth by scaling customer engagement. Optimove combines the art of marketing with the science of data to autonomously generate actionable insight, empowering marketers to deliver highly-effective personalized CRM campaigns across multiple channels. Audience segmentation is taken to an level of “emotionally-intelligent” communication that helps marketers maximize customer spend, engagement, retention and lifetime value.

Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics creates a holistic view of your business to truly understand your customer’s journey on the web. Forrester reports Adobe Analytics as the leader in customer analytics last year. Adobe Analytics Cloud allows you to closely track your digital marketing campaigns and their performances, recognize and create different types of data segments for remarketing, offer a customized shopping experience to your site visitors, and works with bare-minimum data latency, particularly during the periods of peak traffic activity. Adobe Analytics Cloud also connects to a wide range of native and 3^rd party tools to easily bring in 3^rd party data to the tool.  Adobe Analytics is an enterprise tool with pricing for a license that ranges from $30,000 to $300,000 a year.

No business should pursue marketing without audience segmentation. With this range of audience segmentation tools to meet the needs of any business, there is no reason not to.

Does your business need further dialogue on audience segmentation?