Audience segmentation opens up your business to create more meaningful opportunities with customers, making it easier for conversion or nudging them to take the right action.

There are numerous audience segmentation software options in the market, ranging in levels of usability, scalability, features, analytics, and reporting functionality. So how do you know what features are needed to drive growth in your business?

To help you sift through the options we've shared the seven questions you need to ask when looking at different audience segmentation software options.

7 questions to ask when looking for audience segmentation software options

Is your data unified in a customer data platform?

This is one of the first questions to ask when researching audience segmentation software options. Why? Because it will show the immediate potential of your new tool.

In a 2019 report, businesses used an average of 16 data sources to track their customer's behavior and sales journey. This number has likely grown now, so with access to large amounts of data you need a platform that will help collate it, clean it (i.e remove duplicates) and ensure it remains updated in real-time.

A customer data platform (CDP) can do all of this, and choosing the right option means your segmentation software tool can be integrated or better yet, is available within the same platform.

Ortto’s CDP is designed to consolidate data from multiple data sources and digital touchpoints across devices and channels, then unify it. This means you can see the complete picture of your customers to understand their needs, what drives them, how they want to interact with you and deliver a meaningful experience to them.

This unification of data is crucial to ensure your customer's data is correct so you can operationalize and use it to its full potential to maximize revenue and growth.

Can you create a hyper-personalized experience with your segmentation tool?

Personalization is a must-have when building your marketing campaigns, the more data you have available to you in one platform, the more specific your segments can be, meaning the more specific your content can become.

Your segmentation tool needs to be equipped to easily handle and execute complex personalization tasks to gain a competitive edge. For example, you want to be able to use your customer data to build customized campaigns that match the behaviors or actions of your customers, like past purchases or features used within the product.

From here, you can send tailored messaging on 'recommended products' or 'upsell product feature packages', which will provide a much better customer experience and in turn increase your chances of conversion.

Ortto can collect and collate customer, transactional and behavioral data from all of your data sources and, once collected, allows you to create an infinite amount of audiences which ensures your customers will see value in the communications you send out.

The benefit of a powerful segmentation software tool was experienced by the mobile storage provider and Ortto customer, TAXIBOX. When Melbourne was placed into lockdown, TAXIBOX created an audience segment that included:

• Audience members living in Melbourne, who had also;

• Generated a quote for an interstate move,

• Viewed the interstate moving page as a known contact,

• Started and not completed a booking that was an interstate move in the past 30 days.

TAXIBOX was then able to send an email confirming they were still operating through lockdown and could handle a contactless interstate move. A far better approach than blast batch emailing to your entire audience base.

Does it have reporting and analytics capabilities?

Analytics and reporting functionality allow you to quickly understand your customers by tracking the success of your segmented marketing campaigns.

See at a glance what drives your customers to click and, more importantly, convert, while also diving deeper into specific campaigns or content pieces that actually win business. The analytics and reporting features that will help you achieve business success include:

• Variation in reporting options - how can your results and data be visualized in the best way.

• Can you attribute revenue per campaign - know the dollar amount coming in.

• Build multi-step funnels to better understand customer behavior.

Analytics also allows companies to work more in a more agile environment by using features like A/B testing, you can quickly see what your customers respond better to and the learnings can be quickly executed in the current campaign and ongoing.

Ortto’s analytics and reporting function allow users to create reports utilizing all customer data, building a 360-degree view of your segments and campaigns. Then keep your team aligned by sharing notifications and updates of the campaign through platforms like Slack, this will ensure your team can work fast in refining any campaign improvements or knowing what campaigns to keep and repeat.

Does your segmentation software allow integrations?

Marketers talk about building a 360-degree view of customers, and choosing an audience segmentation tool that integrates with other products will be one of the best ways to achieve this bird's eye view.

A tool that can integrate with various other data sources coupled with a powerful CDP will mean that you can pull all your customer information into one central source of truth. Typically, businesses will want to be able to see customer website behavior (e.g Google Analytics), actions taken on social media channels (e.g Facebook Ads), actions and queries on customer support platforms (e.g Zendesk), and payment management platforms (e.g Stripe or Recurly).

All these different touch points will provide a “behind the scenes” look at your customer's interactions on various channels. This will allow you to generate specific segments well suited for the campaign, and the customer.

Ortto offers a range of integrations for users to create the segments needed from their customer data to achieve their business goals. And on top of that, Ortto integrates with platforms like Zapier, Slack, and Calendly that can help automate tasks to make any campaign work seamlessly, especially when building customer journeys, which we touch on later.

Are you able to segment at different stages of the customer journey?

Customers take different actions depending on where they are sitting within the customer journey, so it's important to tailor their messaging, content, and call-to-action to match. Choose a segmentation tool that will cater to customer journey marketing.

For example, a customer has submitted a contact sales form, and met with your sales team but is unable to sign up for a plan as they are researching other products leading up to their current provider's plan ending. In Ortto, the action of not signing up can be the trigger to enter this potential customer into a nurture journey, as well as use tags to categorize this customer's position in the journey.

By tagging them accordingly, you can create a segment and use it when creating new nurture campaigns to help keep your brand top of mind with customers.

Can you compare cohorts and identify patterns?

Cohort analysis as a reporting tool is very beneficial for companies when tracking actions and looking for behavioral trends within the customer base. This report style enables marketers to ask specific, targeted questions and make better data-driven product decisions that will lead to a reduction in churn and an increase in revenue.

Spending time tracking and analyzing your cohort will give you a further understanding of your customer, so you can build a better segment strategy for your email campaigns.

Are you able to create journeys and playbooks?

You’ll want to ask this question when researching different audience segmentation tools as journeys and playbooks are crucial when nudging your customers to convert or retain their business.

For example, you’ve found that 30-45-year-old customers who subscribe to your newsletter are more likely to upgrade their plan or add extra features compared to those who aren’t subscribers.

A robust segmentation tool will identify customers who fall into the age demographic but are non-subscribers. This should trigger a nurture journey to nudge the customers to subscribe to the newsletter using personalized content relevant to them and their needs or start a retargeting campaign through social channels and Google.

Let's say, this 30-45-year-old segment is an ideal customer audience group. As an Ortto customer, you can use the customer journey builder to create campaigns to nurture and retain these customers, or cross - or upsell their plans to match their needs. You can also track when high-value users fall out of this segment and set up an alert that warns your success team. This will mean reaching out and preventing churn before it happens. This segment can also be synced with your ad platforms such as Facebook, Google, or Twitter for retargeting or to build lookalike audiences of your most successful.

Final word

With plenty of options available, finding the right tool for your business can be deemed a job in itself. Ortto allows everything to be done using a single platform, making it easier to understand your customers, and design better, hyper-personalized campaigns more likely to achieve results.

Once you see the growth, you’ll be motivated to set up new segments and continuously optimize your customers' experience with Ortto.