While it’s true that no two people are identical, we’re also not as unique as we’d like to believe. That’s what makes segmentation so powerful. If you succeed in understanding the distinct needs, preferences and behaviours of different groups within your customer base, you’re well on your way to boosting business results.
Not convinced? Leading consultancy firm McKinsey found that personalisation can lift revenues by 5 to 15%, highlighting the impact of tailored marketing and services in driving engagement and sales. Segmentation is definitely the path to personalisation but, as our colleague Eva Vandenberge highlighted during her recent talks at UBA and MIE’25, many companies struggle to make it work.
Below are three key challenges shared by her audience and some insights that will help you tackle them.
1. How can we ensure other teams actually use our segmentation?
Developing a technically sound segmentation might not even be your biggest challenge when building a segmentation model. This frustration shared by one company might be familiar: they meticulously analysed the data, tested various models, and confidently delivered what they believed was a solid customer segmentation, only to watch it gather dust because the different teams barely used it.
We’ve seen it all too often: even the most robust segmentation can fail if it’s not actionable and adopted across the organisation. Too many companies rush into the process and overlook a couple of crucial steps. Our 5-step approach will ensure your well-crafted model doesn’t suffer this unfortunate fate.
1. Discover & learn
Talk to all relevant stakeholders to ensure you understand their needs and how they currently work with customer data. You can hardly expect them to use a segmentation if it doesn’t fit their needs exactly.
2. Plan for success
This stage is all about gaining stakeholder buy-in and building an ambassador team. You won’t be able to tackle all needs and questions at once. You’ll need to prioritise and make tough choices all stakeholders agree upon.
3. Collect & develop
You’ve finally arrived at the nitty-gritty part of the process. Only now will you start building a model based on internal data and possibly additional qualitative and quantitative research, depending on the needs you’ve agreed upon.
4. Share & adapt
Have your stakeholders validate the segmentation model you’ve built, and refine or adapt it based on their feedback. Consider a test run that clearly demonstrates the added value of the segmentation for all teams.
5. Implement & adopt
Implementing your segmentation should be much easier when you’ve successfully gone through the previous steps. But remember: segmentation is a journey. Keep it alive by regularly sharing success stories from different teams. Follow up on trends and consider a re-run when market conditions shift, your offering or strategy evolves, the segmentation becomes less actionable, or stakeholders indicate it's no longer meeting their needs.
Our work at boobook is not limited to collecting and developing segmentation models. We can support you through the entire process from stakeholder interviews to organising workshops to support your teams when they start implementing the model.
“By combining strategic guidance with practical support, we ensure your segmentation strategy is embraced across teams and effectively translated into actionable insights that drive results.” - Eva Vandenberge
2. How can we integrate attitudinal and motivational variables into our CRM database for improved targeting?
Internal data serves as a good starting point for your segmentation, but it will only get you so far. You’ll be able to define your segments in terms of demographics and behaviour, but not needs, attitudes and motivations. These are often precisely the variables that will make your segmentation more actionable, as they are an excellent starting point for your positioning, product development and marketing and communication efforts.
A carefully crafted research design will allow you to build a much more granular segmentation, but to target the identified segments you must ensure to integrate these new insights into your CRM database. Our data analysts are experts on the matter. They will either:
- Combine your internal data and newly gathered consumer insights into one single, yet comprehensive predictive model.
- Build a nested segmentation model, as we did for Telenet. This model proved invaluable in finetuning their CRM targeting to better serve their customers.
3. And what about AI?
Another topic that inevitably came up during Eva’s sessions was AI. We don’t recommend using it to develop your segmentation model. Currently at least, there are no real benefits, and AI's tendency to hallucinate can undermine the reliability of your model. We do believe AI can add value in other ways.
“That’s why the boobook team has developed an AI chatbot to help you engage with yoursegments. This tool allows you to have conversations with your segments,sparking new insights and fresh ideas on how to approach them.” - Eva Vandenberge
Curious about how we can support you in bringing segmentation to life? Reach out to our team!
Eager to learn from Telenet’s approach? You’re in luck! On Thursday, April 3rd we’re hosting a webinar on Telenet’s approach. Don’t miss out: register here for a unique roadmap for effective customersegmentation.
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