How to Tailor Your Ecommerce Store for Different User Segments

How to Tailor Your Ecommerce Store for Different User Segments

Audience segmentation could be the most powerful tool in your kit for increasing sales. 

Failure to understand the specific needs of your target audience, and what they’re looking for from your company can lead to significant problems for business owners. Today, every customer is looking for a highly personalized, relevant, and engaging experience online. 

By segmenting your customers, you split the various user personas who approach your store into different groups, delivering content and experiences based on their specific needs. 

According to some studies, segmented campaigns can drive up to 760% higher revenue growth for companies. Plus, they improve your chances of generating loyalty among your target audience.

The question is, where do you get started?

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Defining Client Segmentation for your Ecommerce brand

Consumer segmentation in the ecommerce landscape is the process of dividing your clientele into groups based on their needs and expectations. This should help you to design marketing and promotional strategies that resonate better with your target audience. 

The good news for today’s ecommerce brands, is defining your consumer market segments, and building strategies around them can often be much simpler than it seems. 

Apps like Dialogue for Shopify come with segmentation capabilities built-in, so you can create different assets for different groups. For instance, you might showcase a recommendation carousel of products based on the product category your customer visits most often. You can also showcase promotional banners and messages based on your customer’s average order value, cart value, location, or even the day of the week. 

While there are many ways to build a customer segmentation strategy, the types of segmentation you use will usually fall into four categories:

  • Demographic segmentation: This involves separating your customers based on specific characteristics like age, gender, family status, income, and even education. For instance, you may suggest different products in your clothing store to your customers based on whether they identify as a man or a woman, or based on their age. 
  • Behavioural segmentation: This process involves dividing your customers according to how they’ve interacted with your brand in the past. You can look at things like how many times they’ve visited your website, their average order value, and the kind of products they generally purchase with your company.
  • Geographical segmentation: One of the simplest forms of segmentation, geographic segmentation involves sharing different content and offers with your customers based on where they’re located in the world. 
  • Psychographic segmentation: Psychographic customer segmentation looks at how your customers feel about businesses in your industry, their values, and their preferences as people. For instance, some customers will be more drawn to companies selling eco-friendly products.

Ecommerce Strategies for Target Audience Segmentation

Now you know a little more about the different kinds of information you can use to segment your target customers, we can dive a little deeper into the ways you can group your customers to boost your chances of increasing sales

  • Cart Abandonment

The more you know about your customer’s journey, the easier it is to gently nudge them through the conversion process. Insights into which customers are more likely to leave your store before buying anything can be extremely helpful for reducing the risk of missed opportunities. When you can separate focused buyers and “cart abandoners”, you can implement additional strategies to convert anyone who may not purchase something on the first visit. 

For instance, you could Send automated “come back” emails to your customers to bring them back to your website, or use banners and pop-up offers to reduce the risk of abandonment in the first place. Making the checkout process as simple as possible for all users will also keep your abandonment risk to a minimum when you’re trying to increase sales among your core audience.

  • High spenders

If you’re already tracking things like average visitor order value and cart value within your target groups, you can adjust your segmentation strategy to focus heavily on higher spenders. If you know which of your customers are most likely to spend the most money, you can advertise your bigger ticket items to these clients without worrying about chasing them away. Tools like Dialogue offer Smart Engine technology which recognizes user behavior and allows businesses to show different offers to specific customers. 

You’ll also be able to focus heavily on improving the loyalty and retention of these big spenders. Dialogue’s technology can also recognize if a customer is a first-time visitor or repeat customer, and deliver customized messages or “Welcome Back” offers. 

You could even create special deals just for your big spenders, like discounted product bundles, or free next-day delivery. You could also use banners and pop-ups to invite your big spenders to join your loyalty and reward programs. 

  • First time visitors

If your customers are visiting your website for the first time, it’s important to capture their attention as quickly as possible, and convince them to convert before they lose interest. You can track the days since a previous visit to see if a customer is brand-new or not. 

If a customer hasn’t visited your website before, they might need a little more help finding the products they need. This could mean you decide to create a carousel showcasing your top-selling products just for new visitors. This carousel could be changed to show specific items relevant to your customers after they’ve spent some time browsing other pages. 

You might also consider giving your first-time visitors special discounts in exchange for their email address, so you can continue nurturing them in future. 

  • Indecisive shoppers

Some customers will come to your website knowing exactly what they want from your brand. These consumers are often easier to market to. Based on the pages they visit during their shopping session, and the products they add to their cart, you can suggest they items they might want to consider purchasing again in future. 

However, there will be some shoppers who spend a lot of time browsing your website, without really knowing what they want. They might spend more time chatting with your team on your live support app, or add a lot of products to their cart before removing them. 

You can help indecisive shoppers convert by suggesting additional products they might be interested in whenever they add something to their cart, or showcasing the items customers frequently purchase together. Showing social proof on your website can also boost your chances of sales.

  • Shoppers in different locations

As mentioned above, segmenting your audience by geographical location is one of the easiest ways to separate your customers. Depending on where your audience is in the world, you may be able to offer different services, like express shipping or free shipping. 

You can also suggest different products or solutions based on where your audience is, with your knowledge of shopping habits in certain regions. 

Researching your target audience and their different locations and backgrounds can help you to make better promotional decisions too. For instance, you might learn the customers you have in the UK are more likely to make a purchase on a Monday, so you can offer your best deals on Mondays too. Alternatively, you might combine location with the time of day to offer special discounts to customers at certain times, like “late night sales”.

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Making the Most of Your Segmentation Strategy

Knowing how to adjust your sales and marketing strategies for each specific audience your ecommerce company caters for is crucial. The more personalized your sales strategy is through target market segmentation, the more you can enhance the shopping experience for your clients. 

Ensure you’re taking advantage of tools like Dialogue to help with customizing your sales strategy to different groups, and collect as much data as you safely can about each audience group to inspire your future campaigns. 

Connect with dialogue today to learn how you can make the most of each specific audience segment relevant to your business.

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