Customer segmentation is a crucial strategy for customer success teams as it allows them to categorize customers into groups based on shared traits like interests, needs, demographics, behaviours, or spending patterns.
By dividing your customers into groups, customer success teams can better understand their customer base and tailor their engagement and education strategies to foster stronger relationships and enhance customer satisfaction. Segmentation also helps businesses identify high-value segments with the most significant impact, ensure that critical resources are focused on meeting strategic needs, and ensure maximum return on investment.
Key takeaways
Segmentation enables prioritization and personalization – By grouping customers based on characteristics like behavior, firmographics, and lifecycle stage, customer success teams can allocate resources and tailor engagement more effectively.
Enhanced retention and churn prevention – Identifying at-risk segments early allows proactive interventions—such as targeted onboarding or support—that reduce churn rates.
Unlocks upsell and cross-sell potential – Segmented approaches help pinpoint high-value segments, enabling strategic upselling and cross-selling campaigns tailored to each group.
Customer journey customization – Mapping different segments through onboarding, adoption, and renewal stages allows for smoother, more effective customer journeys.
Diverse segmentation models improve insight depth – Firmographic, behavioural, psychographic, technographic, and lifecycle stage segmentation offer nuanced perspectives, enabling richer insights and actions.
Customization of customer education is segment-dependent – Customer education—like video tutorials, multilingual content, or peer forums—should align with the preferences of specific segments (e.g., younger users vs. enterprise clients).
Why invest in customer segmentation?
Understanding that not all customers are the same is critical for busy customer success teams. Different customers have varying needs and impacts, so customer success teams need to be able to logically adjust their levels of engagement accordingly.
Segmentation allows teams to prioritize their efforts and focus on the specific needs of each group, ensuring a more efficient allocation of time and resources. This tailored approach improves customer experience and enhances the overall effectiveness of customer success initiatives. Segmentation also allows for:
- Personalized engagement: Segmentation helps craft personalized onboarding, support, engagement strategies and messaging.
- Proactive churn prevention: Customer success teams can proactively intervene by identifying at-risk segments with solutions that address common pain points, reducing churn and improving customer retention.
- Enhanced upselling and cross-selling opportunities: Identifying segments that can be nurtured with targeted campaigns gives opportunities to increase the revenue per customer.
- Map different customer journeys: By understanding different customer categories, customer success teams can customize smoother and more effective transitions between onboarding, adoption, and renewal.
Customer segmentation models
Customer success teams can segment their customer base using various criteria. Deciding which model to use will require understanding your business objectives, customer base, the products and services you offer and the specific outcomes you want to achieve. Here are some example criteria to consider using:
- Firmographics: Company size, industry, number of employees
- User demographics: Age, gender, location, income
- Geographic: Location, including country, state, city, and town.
- Behavioural: Product usage patterns, engagement levels, or feature adoption.
- Revenue potential: Customer lifetime value (CLV), deal size, or renewal likelihood.
- Lifecycle stage: Onboarding, growth, maturity, or renewal phase.
- Psychographic: Feelings and attitudes like values, interests, attitudes, lifestyle, opinions
- Technographic: Comfort level or use of technology like devices used, software preferences, and digital engagement levels
- Cultural: Values, language, traditions, ethnicity, religion and social norms.
Implementing segmentation for success
Customer success teams require various tools to effectively gather, analyze, and act on data to implement customer segmentation. Here’s a breakdown of the kind of tools you may use to build the foundational data to start your customer segmentation:
- Data collection tools: Like CRM systems to store and manage customer data (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot): To store and manage customer data, survey tools to collect customer feedback and preferences (e.g., SurveyMonkey, Typeform), web analytics tools to track online behaviour (e.g., Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics)
- Data enrichment tools: To enrich customer profiles with additional data like demographics or firmographics (e.g., Clearbit, ZoomInfo)
- Customer data platforms (CDPs): To unify and segment customer data across channels (e.g., Segment, Amplitude).
- Behavioural analysis tools: Use heatmaps and session recording tools (e.g., Hotjar, Crazy Egg) to understand customer interactions on your website and customer journey mapping tools (e.g., UXPressia, Smaply).
- Psychographic and sentiment analysis tools: Social listening tools to gather insights on customer attitudes and sentiment and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to analyze customer feedback or reviews for psychographic insights.
Tools for customer segmentation analysis
Once you have data, technology also helps facilitate effective customer segmentation. Here are some tools to explore:
- Peak.ai: Utilizes headless segmentation, integrating data from multiple touchpoints to create comprehensive customer profiles. This approach predicts customer behaviours, such as future purchases or churn likelihood, enhancing targeted marketing strategies. (Influencer Marketing Hub)
- HubSpot: Offers AI-powered segmentation within its CRM platform, allowing businesses to categorize contacts based on demographics, behaviour, and engagement.
- Mixpanel: Provides behavioural analytics to segment customers based on their interactions with products or services.
- UserGuiding: Creating in-app guides and segmenting users to enhance onboarding experiences and user engagement.
- Creatio: Build custom target segments based on the system data, such as the history of orders and requests, responses, interests, and needs.
B2C vs B2B customer segmentation
Customer segmentation differs significantly between B2B and B2C due to the differences in target audiences, purchasing behaviours, and decision-making processes.
The B2B buying process typically involves multiple decision-makers, longer sales cycles and rational, data-driven, and ROI-focused purchase decisions. For these reasons, B2B companies might use firmographics, purchase behaviours, decision-making roles, customer needs, lifecycle stage, and technology stack as segmentation models.
On the other hand, B2C buying decisions are often driven by emotion, convenience, prestige, personal preferences or trends and made by an individual or family. This is why B2C customer success teams might use demographics, psychographics, geography, behavioural data and needs and interests to segment their customers.
How segmentation affects customer education
Customer segmentation is a powerful tool for customer success teams to plan and prioritize customer education activities. It allows them to tailor educational content, modalities and learning journeys to meet the specific needs of various customer groups.
The method of delivering educational content should also align with the preferences of different segments. Younger, tech-savvy audiences might prefer video tutorials, while professional audiences might benefit from instructor-led training or hands-on exercises.
Offering content in multiple languages helps engage a global customer base, and ensuring compatibility with mobile devices caters to customers who prefer learning on the go. Finally, forums or peer-to-peer learning communities allow customers from different segments to share insights and best practices, creating a richer and more engaging learning environment.
LEAi for customer segments
LEAi, as an AI-powered training and content creation platform, can be tailored to serve different customer segments effectively by leveraging its core features and adapting its capabilities to meet specific needs. Here’s how LEAi can be used across various customer segments:
B2B enterprise customers – Corporate training and employee onboarding
- Automate the creation of employee onboarding programs.
- Build customized training modules for diverse teams across departments.
- Offer scalable learning solutions for global teams by incorporating role-specific content.
Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) – Cost-effective training
- Provide SMBs with affordable yet high-quality training solutions.
- Equip SMBs with tools to upskill employees and improve operational efficiency.
Government and non-profit organizations – Compliance and awareness training
- Develop courses for compliance, public awareness campaigns, or community training programs.
- Create standardized training content for large-scale distribution.
Technology companies – Product training and customer education
- Build customer education programs for better adoption of software or hardware products.
- Equip support teams with the latest product knowledge.
Healthcare and pharmaceuticals – Regulatory training and patient education
- Ensure compliance training for healthcare professionals.
- Educate patients about medical procedures or new drug introductions.
To build training for the different customer segments, LEAi offers the following features:
- Accelerated content development: LEAi transforms existing documents, presentations, and videos into structured learning materials, reducing course creation time by up to 98%.
- Automated assessment generation: The platform automatically generates test questions, facilitating the evaluation of learners’ understanding without additional effort.
- Content repurposing across formats: LEAi allows for the repurposing of content into various formats, including eLearning modules, instructor-led training, webinars, and videos, ensuring consistency across different training modalities.
- Intelligent course updates: The tool enables simultaneous updates across all courses, ensuring that training materials remain current and accurate.
- Microlearning creation: LEAi breaks down extensive content into smaller, digestible modules, enhancing learner engagement and retention.
By leveraging these features, customer success teams can efficiently produce and maintain training resources, leading to improved customer onboarding, increased product adoption, and reduced support costs. Contact us to request a demo of how LEAi can work for you.
