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Thought Leadership

The Segment of One

By: Steven Noels, CTO and Co-Founder, NGDATA

We’re in an age where companies are able to collect, analyze and make use of customer data from more channels than ever before, which in theory would make an organization smarter about its customers. However, most organizations still struggle to interact with customers in a timely and relevant manner – making the right offers to the right customers at the right time. This is because traditional marketing segments based on factors such as age and location simply don’t lend themselves to the personalized experience customers now expect. If you’re working with, say, 10 static segments on more generalized information, responses from this type of marketing program can’t compare to the ROI of campaigns when you connect with more contextually relevant and timely programs. Connecting when the customer is ready, not based on the company’s marketing schedules.

Instead, marketers have been able to gain greater results when they can work with more detailed and dynamic information on each individual, rather than treating people as members of broad segments at a single point in time. That’s why at NGDATA, we’ve set out to change the game by driving toward a “Segment of One” approach.

The concept of the “Segment of One,” which in essence is delivering the right offer at the right time to the right customer (versus a segmented group,) may seem a daunting thought for any organization. Many believe that in order to work with this approach, you need to create as many offers as there are customers, developing a product for each. This isn’t true.

We have found that companies that focus on the individual customers’ behaviors over time, and through machine learning, offer planning and using rules, marketing campaigns can become more effective over time to deliver offers based on the actual propensities of those customers – at the individual level. As mentioned in a previous blog about Customer DNA, monitoring how a customer’s behavior has evolved over the course of their relationship with your company is critical in understanding just which offer is the right one to make at the right time. Even if your company doesn’t feel like they can take this leap, you need to start down this path, delivering more personalized experiences to be more relevant in your interactions to each individual customer. Your customers have high expectations and they are only getting more critical as the days pass.

Individual behavior is the key driver for our Lily Enterprise solution. We can make truly personalized offers and promotions with relevance- and that customers are more likely to act on. That’s incredibly important when you’re trying to interact with your customers in a relevant manner – with the bonus of upsell and creating long-term, high-value relationships.

Has your company discussed a path toward a “Segment of One” mentality?