How can retailers break through the glut of advertising and marketing messages this holiday season to earn more share of wallet?
Microsegmentation—creating categories of customers that share an ultra-specific matrix of behaviors and interests—could be your secret weapon. This strategy requires retailers to capture and activate engagement and purchase data to create multiple real-time segments, and then deploy relevant content in the channels customers are most engaged in.
Klaviyo recommends six microsegments for the holiday season, each with varying levels of engagement. We’ve paired them with recommended content that leverages the engagement and purchase data you already have.
● Nearly theres: These potential customers have shown intent in the last few months, but haven't made purchases yet. Provide them with user-generated content, price drops, time-limited deals or incentives to push them over the line.
● Espresso shot: These potential customers who have engaged with your brand in the last 72 hours, but haven't made purchases. Use price drops, time-sensitive deals and product launch announcements to convert them quickly.
● High rollers: These frequent buyers have made recent high-value purchases. Treat them as VIPs by offering exclusive product drops, private shopping hours or invitations to loyalty programs.
● Potential high rollers: These customers made recent high-value purchases, but overall they buy at a low frequency. Motivate them to buy more often with cross-selling, replenishment flows and invitations to loyalty programs.
● Brand enthusiasts: These loyal customers buy often, but not at a high price point. Encourage them to increase their average order value through cross-selling, volume-based discounts or replenishment flows.
● Former VIPs: These customers made significant purchases in the past, but haven't bought in the last six months. Share new product announcements, special offers and user-generated content to win them back.
Ensuring data accuracy for microsegmentation
For microsegmentation to work, and for your marketing team to be able to quickly implement it, customer data quality and breadth are critical. If you have customer data living across various platforms and not syncing into a single source, activating this data through microsegmentation is going to be far harder, and more manual, for your team.
The solution here is leveraging a tool that can ingest data from all of your ecommerce touchpoints, from your website to your loyalty program and shipping platforms, and everything in between.
With all of that data syncing in real time to a single, accessible source of customer data, microsegmentation quickly becomes business as usual. No need for batch-and-blast strategies, or developers syncing data between a data warehouse and a marketing tool—both of which cause business inefficiencies internally and negatively affect the bottom line.
Integrated marketing is far easier with a single source of data truth, too. You also can use the data to create segments for a variety of channels, including email, pop-up forms, SMS messages, paid ads, and beyond. Integrating all your data sources with one central platform ensures the seamless flow of valuable customer information, making it easier to create targeted campaigns across channels.
All of this puts the power of personalization at scale in your brand’s hands, turning this long-standing marketing myth into reality.
That's not just good for brands— it's good for customers, too. Baby retailer Caden Lane has found that customers are more than happy to pitch in on its personalization efforts. The brand collects granular customer data in its email sign-up pop-up, requesting information on the shopper's child's age, gender and birthday.
The team discovered through A/B testing that requesting more data counterintuitively resulted in more signups. It set an expectation of personalized, relevant marketing messaging—and that appealed to customers.
This especially helped during BFCM 2022, when the company was just shy of its revenue goal. In order to maintain their margin goal, too, the team knew they had to get a message in market while keeping the average discount below 15%.
So, they pulled a report on total discount usage for the week. Not every discount code sent had been redeemed—and the team realized they had leeway to send a steep, targeted discount to customers most likely to buy that day.
They created a microsegment of people who had items in their cart, but had yet to check out. Then they pulled together a quick campaign for just those folks, with an exclusive discount code. “That one send pushed us over the finish line,” said Bryant Jaquez, Caden Lane's chief marketing officer.
Caden Lane met their Black Friday revenue goal and beat their margin goal. “[Tools like Klaviyo are] like a sidekick to growth strategy,” said Jacquez.
Finally, the beauty of microsegmenting is that it drives sales across small and large retailers alike. You do not have to be a big box retailer or a global e-commerce platform to implement the strategy. You just need a single source of customer data truth that connects customer data to marketing activations, and powers smarter digital relationships.
By analyzing customer data, segmenting your customers effectively, and crafting personalized marketing campaigns, you can rise above the holiday clutter and achieve results that are worth celebrating this holiday season.
