The one size fits all approach to digital marketing is soon to be a thing of the past. These day’s more and more businesses are turning to optimization and personalization practices to break the paradigm of a static website browsing experience, instead opting to deliver relevant content with willing users in real-time. By removing the irrelevant clutter and driving a user towards their goal you greatly increase the chances of that user performing an interaction.
The interaction might be an important sale or it might be a lead generation request or it may be a self service action. Whatever it is, any interaction is valuable to a business on some level. Not only does it justify the digital expense but it represents a profit to the business.
Segment population
Segment population varies depending on the Segment.
Let’s look at a very basic example of a Returning Visitor Segment. By itself it might represent 60-70% of your overall traffic which makes quite a large segment. We also know that returning visitors is a highly valuable segment.
Segment opportunity = segment size X segment value score
Another great thing about the returning visitror segment is that it’s opposite, the new visitor segment completes the total value of the segment. eg: new + returning = 100% of web site traffic. Meaning that a new vs returning campaign will touch 100% of visitors.
Segmentation vs One-to-one
Segmentation is not the same thing as one-to-one profiling. It’s amazing how many times a client running an effective Segmentation strategy suddenly jump to one-to-one profiling and back without any clear differentiator.
When do we segment and when do we one-to-one?
If we have an offer or promotion that is specific to only one visitor or user, then this is obviously a valid use case for a one-to-one campaign.However if we have an offer that is open to one or more visitors then this is a segment.
Segment optimization goes a step beyond segment reporting. It identifies and presents the best performing page recipe to your visitors, based on the users individual characteristics.
Most of the time, you will see that different segments respond to different test recipes, sometimes in a dramatic fashion. As we know, visitor behavior and preference can vary significantly on weekends vs. weekdays, on different keyword searches, even from browser to browser.
Optimization comes into play when you want to match each of these segments with the test winner in that segment, in real time. Segment Optimization will match the highest performing recipe with each user giving you an impressive dramatic conversion increase.
