In a digital landscape where privacy and relevance are paramount, striking the right balance between personalized marketing and customer anonymity can be challenging for any e-commerce store.

You've got GDPR compliance, data storage, cookies, and much more to juggle.

This is why we've created an article all about our Audience tool and how best it can be used for your store.

You can achieve highly targeted and relevant marketing strategies without compromising your customers' privacy or wasting valuable time. And the best part about our Audience tool is that it's completely cookieless.

In this blog post, we'll explore several ways in which you can leverage audience segmentation to optimize and get the most out of your marketing efforts.

Why should you be utilizing audience segmentation for an effective marketing strategy?

To maximize the potential of audience segmentation, it's crucial that you:

• Keep your segments up-to-date using the marketing tools you already employ. 
• Utilize product interests, life cycle analysis, and customer behavior to create dynamic segments that focus on what customers do rather than just who they are. ‍
• Create targeted marketing campaigns for each segment‍
• Delve into customer analytics to identify high-value customers that help you prioritize your ad spend effectively.

It sounds complicated, but we promise you it isn't. In fact, you can keep all your audience segments up to date with the tools you're already using. 

So, let's dive in.

Audience: Understanding this game-changing tool

Before diving into our best practices, let's quickly familiarize ourselves with Audience. 

In essence, Audience is a revolutionary E-Commerce tool that turns traditional recommendations upside down.

How? Well, instead of finding the right products for one customer, Audience empowers marketers to discover the ideal customers for specific products, categories, price ranges, and marketing purposes. 

While Audience does work as a CDP, it also takes segmentation to the next level by automatically identifying customer groups based on their consumer behavior rather than their demographics, which is ultimately much more relevant and targeted for e-commerce businesses.

Why you should seamlessly integrate your marketing platforms with Audience

Audience does not exist in a vacuum; it should be seamlessly integrated with your existing marketing platforms and even Clerk’s Email tool. 

Setting up integrations with Google Ads, Facebook, and your email client allows you to automate your audience segmentation and instantly sync this within each system.  

This eliminates the tedious task of manually copy-pasting, which saves you time and, frankly, removes all potential headaches associated. Because let’s face it, spending hours copying and pasting data is the last thing you want to be doing with your time.

Unleash your creativity by utilizing product interests

It's now time to get creative.

Begin by identifying your top categories and brands—around ten of each—to create broad segments with larger volumes of data.

If you sell beauty products, this could include shampoos, moisturizers, or any other popular products. 

Using the "Interested In" parameter, Audience helps you identify customers likely to be interested in these specific products or categories, even if they haven't purchased them yet. 

This approach is essential as it makes sure you're promoting not only the "safe option" products but also long-tail products that often go unnoticed, unlocking hidden profit potential. By tailoring your marketing based on these customer interests, you can identify niche items that resonate with specific segments and improve your customer engagement.

How to leverage lifecycle analysis

Your customers are not all the same. What do we mean by this? Well, your different customers have different patterns of purchasing. Obvious, I know. But take the following customers:

1. ‍Customer One purchases a small number of products from your store every month.‍
2. Customer Two makes much larger purchases, but only on a yearly basis. 
   

Many systems would categorize the second customer as slipping away. But are they? 

Our Audience tool will help you calculate the behavior of each individual customer and how to treat them accordingly. 

Lifecycle analysis will then enable you to segment these customers and tailor marketing toward each. So now you can market smaller items to Customer One monthly and larger purchases to Customer Two less frequently.

And the other cool features?:

• You can identify slipping away and lost customers to initiate targeted reactivation campaigns. 
• Craft specialized marketing strategies using previous interests, coupon codes, time-limited offers, and personalized incentives. 
• Allocate a portion of your marketing budget to convert one-time buyers into repeat customers.
• Treat your VIP customers with care and attention, as they generate significant revenue and hold substantial profit potential.

Using Audience with Email: how to deliver relevant content

You've created your segments. Now let's market to them.

1. Start by syncing Audience with your email client to deliver highly relevant content to each segment. 
2. After doing so, create recurring email flows tailored to each audience segment, showcasing the best products within their respective categories. 
3. Create short descriptions for each segmented product. Clerk's Email tool can provide keyword recommendations to automate the selection of the best product matches. 
4. Or, you can even leverage the power of AI-driven email campaigns, allowing personalized send times based on individual customer behavior! 
5. To really get things going, focus on reactivating slipping away and lost customers by offering compelling incentives to regain their attention and loyalty.

Streamline your advertising by using Audience with Ad platforms

Marketing on Ad Platforms is often very expensive when done incorrectly, and the increased focus on privacy only makes it harder to get a good Return on Ad Spend- meaning it’s incredibly challenging to use ad platforms without proper targeting.

This is why you should start streamlining your marketing by using the same segmented groups you created to set up targeted campaigns on Google and Facebook.

Sync your segmented audiences with Google and Facebook to run targeted campaigns. For Facebook, utilize the Lookalike Audience feature with your VIP customers to discover new customers who exhibit similar behavior and preferences. Customers similar to your VIPs are, of course, the ones you want to purchase from your store. They are your VIPs, after all.

By aligning your ad spend with these specific interest groups, you can really streamline your marketing efforts to achieve a higher return on investment.

Utilize customer analytics to focus on profitable segments

You’ve created your segments, and you’re targeting your paid advertising. Now it’s time to analyze. 

Identify your most lucrative categories and create matching audiences based on interests. We suggest creating 3-5 categories. Then use Customer Analytics to compare the potential of each segment.

By analyzing the profit potential of each segment, you can alter and focus your ad spend on high-value segments. 

Dive even deeper by identifying the specific products that resonate with each segment, allowing you to craft highly targeted ads with minimal effort. We recommend doing this regardless of how many ads and segments you use.

Conclusion: Grow your business with Clerk’s Audience

In summation, audience segmentation really is the keyto smarter B2B marketing. By implementing these audience best practices, you can:

• Simplify your workflow
• Personalize your marketing efforts
• Optimize your ad spend.

Want to watch more on our Audience best practices? Clickhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9RKRX3FAME