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Segmentation may be more than enough

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Subject:  Segmentation may be more than enough
Author:   Alex Chudnovsky:   view profile | all posts by this author | add to favourites
Date:   15:27:21 22 February 2004
 
On 10:43:54 19 February 2004 Obi Felten wrote:

> There may not be such a strict dividing line between segmentation and
>personalisation anyway: If you have robust segmentation
>targeting in place, you can start cutting the segments
>finer and finer until you ultimately arrive at an offer
>that is so targeted that it is pretty much personalised.

Indeed I am in full agreement here - finely grained segmentation is indistinguishable from personalisation. Sounds good, but what’s the catch? The catch is hidden in _manual_ nature of traditional segmentation whereby content has to be created to satisfy segments. So why is it a problem? Well, most companies don't do personalisation beyond customer name because they have to create unique content for each of the segments, which takes time and they are simply not prepared to do so!

This is exactly where Matt's question is lurking - how to link finely grained segments to Content Management System, which would be able to generate unique personalised content (more relevant offers) without manual design work!

Back in Jungle the email marketing platform that I developed linked our campaign management system to content so that marketing could just use SKUs, which would be automatically used to generate content for given segment. Later we went even further by using associations (like product X will have relevant up sell products A, B and C), which will then be used to generate very finely grained emails - in essence we had lots of automated segments inside bigger manually selected segment (say customers who bought printers). The key, again, was close integration with CMS, not least because prices, availability and all that tend to change about 5 minutes before you need to deploy already made emails!

This is certainly the way to go for email marketing, as this is the primary reason why we managed to run 1,200 campaigns in just 3 years using part time marketing effort. It is because of our finely grained personalisation that we managed to keep drop outs very low and response and conversions high.

So, my answer to "Segmentation may be more than enough" would be that no, segmentation might have been enough for 2000 but it is certainly not enough in 2004+.

regards,

Alex
 
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  • E-mail Marketing - Personalisation & CMS, matt , 19 Feb 02:02
    I was recently asked to quote on an e-mail marketing solution for a client which would allow personalised content to inserted into e-mails and sent to each user based on their prof ...
    • Segmentation may be more than enough, Obi Felten, 19 Feb 10:43
      Matt Very interesting thoughts in your post, but you might be a step ahead of the market here. Many retailers still hardly segment their email database at all, i.e. just send ...
      • Segmentation may be more than enough, David Godden, 19 Feb 16:09
        Matt, Bluestreak (www.bluestreak.com) have been providing such email personalisation for many years as part of the standard product suite. We call the personalisation portions ...
        • Segmentation may be more than enough, matt , 19 Feb 16:24
          Hi David Yes, I would like more information on how exactly that works i.e. the process that people would follow from inserting content into the system and what formats are suppo ...
      • Segmentation may be more than enough, Alex Chudnovsky, 22 Feb 15:27
        On 10:43:54 19 February 2004 Obi Felten wrote: > There may not be such a strict dividing line between segmentation and >personalisation anyway: If you have robust segmentation ...
        • Segmentation may be more than enough, Huw_Hopkin, 16 Oct 15:23
          While we are talking of segmentation and personalisation can anyone put their hands on the evidence that it works - show me the test and the results and I'll be your friend for lif ...
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