For the last week of our series on customer engagement, I would like to give you a tip to be applied to all engagement steps. Segment your customers! Unless you provide a hyper specif ic product for a certain category of consumer, you are likely to have a very varied public. Unfortunately for you, there is nothing more disengaging than receiving inappropriate content or offers. For example, if you are a man and that a company keeps sending you offers for women make-up and cosmetics, you will soon unsubscribe from that company?s mailing list simply because it seems like that company has nothing interesting for you. It is the same as if you live in Barcelona and that your travel agents sends you offers for city trips in Barcelona. In the end, the company has wasted its t ime and money to reach you and worse, i t lost you, their precious client! So before spreading promotional offers throughout your clientele, before launching picture contests or tweetbattles, you should always segment your public to identify the specif ic targets of your actions.

Which category? The way you segment your customer-base is really up to you. The most important thing to remember is that your segmentation should be relevant to your specif ic business. Once again, if you sell cosmetics, you might segment your audience depending on the gender whereas if you work as travel agent, segmentation based on revenues and age is probably more appropriate than the gender of your clientele.

How to engage your customers in 7 steps

Part 7 ? Customer Segmentat ion

Engage - Ampl ify - Convert Pictawall

Geography is for sure one of the most common and useful segmentation criteria. Although people dif fer greatly from each other, there are often some kinds of similarit ies among people that l ive in the same region. You can identify regions depending on the factors you want: culture, religion or even climate if you think that climate has a major impact on the demand of the population for your products. An excellent example of geographic segmentation is McDonald?s. If you intend to have your favourite McDonald?s meal during your summer vacations this year, watch out, you may not f ind it. The largest fast food chain in the world makes a remarkable adaptation work to propose dif ferent menus depending on

the specif ic demand of the regions it targets. For example, don?t expect to f ind a beef burger when you go to MacDonald?s in Mumbai or New Delhi. The cow being a sacred animal in Hinduism, all you?ll be able to f ind are chicken or f ish burgers (McDonald?s India, 2015). In Japan however, you could try the ?Tsukimi Burger? (Pomposo Carreras, 2014).

http:/ /www.mcdonaldsindia.com/

The importance of data: Identifying which categories you need is great, but then you stil l have to be able to identify which customer belongs to which category. To help you identify them, you need data about your customer-base.

Loyalty cards have long played this role and are stil l useful for you to gather data about your clientele. Nevertheless, the e-commerce has widened even more the opportunities for you to know your customers. The database has just grown so big that you may know what your customer wants even before them. Based on that information, you can send them the offers that they are looking for. If you know who is who and who bought what, you definitely have a great advantage to determine who needs what!

See you soon:Segmenting your customer base is paramount to expand your business. As I already mentioned in the f irst part of our series, ?increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases prof its by 25% to 95% " (Harvard Business School, 2000).

Segmenting your customer base is all about helping you to retain customers. It must be your priority step before spreading any promotional actions, picture contests and so on. Once you have identif ied your segments, tools like Pictawall are your ways to entertain your audience and make sure that it truly sees you as their only provider, in a word, that they are truly engaged.