The art of segment creation - starting out with segments in Customer Intelligence 360
If you are a first time user of Customer Intelligence 360 (and not a previous user of our Marketing Automation solution) while you have likely gone through our training and have had great support and mentoring from our Professional Services team during setup, you may still have that little bit of apprehension with getting your first segment map up and running. The beauty with Engage Direct is that it really allows you to create complex segments that you can then export and leverage in any direct marketing activities. As with our other Customer Intelligence 360 modules we are also constantly working on improving the solution to provide you with more functionalities and help you solve your actual business challenges.
It’s likely you will be storing much more data on-premise so you will more often than not want to create a map out of your on-premises data mart. Still, if you know all the data you need is stored in our data hub then it may be quicker to make use of it and create a segment map from the cloud data hub. The data that will be available to use for your on-premise segment will have been identified by your SAS administrator when would have created the information map in SAS Information Map Studio.
Criteria Nodes will be central to define the segments, or groups of people who share similar characteristics, that you are looking to identify. If at one point during the creation of your segment map you need to change the subject level (say from account user to household) you can insert a Map node. Just remember that all nodes downstream of that one will relate to that new subject.
Multiple criteria nodes can either be combined with an “AND” node or given to meet certain conditions with an “OR” node. Split nodes will allow you to separate an incoming record into more outputs. A limit node will help you create a specific subset of subjects. Prioritize nodes are useful to rank and de-duplicate subjects of an input node, say when you want to target the top 10 subjects with the highest savings. Process nodes will come into play when you have specific stored processes (likely provided by your IT team) that you want to insert into the segment. Link nodes are powerful as they can be leveraged from another segment map, saving you precious time. Finally, you may want to add export nodes if you need to extract certain segments from your segment map.
Overall, it’s worth playing around with the segment map to familiarize yourself with how to build one and to become comfortable with how each different node works.
Two things worth doing when setting up your nodes is to see if you want to mark them as a segment and as linkable. Marking as a segment will allow you to export them and use in your direct marketing, even if there are more nodes downstream. Marking as linkable will allow you to reuse them in another segment map without starting from scratch. Note you won’t be able to set these in either Export, Link, Split or Prioritize nodes.
You may have specific directions as to what segments need to be created for your company’s marketing activities but it’s worthwhile understanding if some segments will often reappear in upcoming campaigns. If so making them linkable will make your life easier. Similarly, you will need to understand how refined your segments need to be. Most often you will refine them by four types of market segmentation: geographic, demographic, psychographic or behavioral, all dependent on what data you have available in your data mart. The refinement will also depend on what channels you wish to use to target these segments and what messages and creatives are aimed at these segments.
If you have a very well-honed message and very good knowledge of your target audience, you may be able to get strong responses from a smaller but more defined segment. If you are looking to reach a wider group, such as for an awareness campaign or for a brand building exercise, it may be worthwhile to limit the number of criteria you use, to give you a large enough pool of targets to reach out to.
As you progress through the deployment of your campaigns you can then decide to experiment, especially if you launch campaigns frequently you can further refine your segment maps. Monitoring the responses and engagement of these audiences will allow you, with time, to define and crystallize the right segments for your campaigns. As always though it’s important to remember that the segments you target are one part, but the success of your campaign is also down to the medium you are using to reach them and the message you are targeting them with.
Do you have good examples of segments you created with Customer Intelligence 360 that helped you successfully deploy marketing campaigns? If so feel free to share more on these in the comments below.
