How do I get started with customer segmentation?

I love this question! Think about your customers in the same way you are hopefully thinking about your prospects. Understanding their needs, pain points, growth opportunities, etc. With that said, I recommend starting by separating your customers into a few buckets - 1) what product do they own? 2) what size company are they? 3) are they at risk or churning (you can look at things like adoption, utilization, etc.)

From there, you can look at the numbers of customers per segment, and determine where you want to focus. And what type of motions are required to achieve your objectives. For example, retention could be the focus for your at risk customers. Where as customers who are doing well your focus could be on expansion (upsell or x-sell).

Company size may or may not matter for your company, but it may help you dig deeper and determine longer term growth strategy based on that variable.

Great question! Customer segmentation is incredibly valuable. To meet customers where they are, you’ll need to have a deep understanding of the problems they are trying to solve. However, everyone doesn’t have the same problems. This is where customer segmentation comes in.

• Goals. Document your business objectives and goals with segmentation. What outcomes are you trying to drive?
• Data and criteria. Conduct an inventory of the data you are currently collecting and identify gaps. You’ll need this to properly personalize your messages. How is the data currently being governed and what improvements are needed?
• Create segments. Depending on your messaging platform, consider creating behavioral-based segments. How do you drive more of the behaviors you need to support your desired outcomes?
• Experimentation. Have a bias towards action. Get started and then experiment and continue to iterate on your segmentation. There are several frameworks to test as well such as “Jobs to be Done”. Go with the framework that best supports your business objectives and helps you solve customers’ problems better.