Want to create advertising design that speaks specifically to each of your customer segments?

We’ve written previously on the importance of understanding what your customer’s needs and wants are through creating Customer Avatars. (click the link to download your free Customer Avatar Worksheet) After you have avatars for known and potential customers you can group them into segments. Customer segmentation allows your business to build design advertising specifically to each customer segment. Knowing who your customers are and what they want helps you to tailor your offerings to their tastes, which in turn opens the doors to increased business and sales in the future.

Once you more deeply understand your customer base, you can target specific information, deals and concepts to meet their needs. Graphic design is an especially effective way to reach your customers and give them the information that they need in a layout they will enjoy interacting with.

Here are the top five ways to capture information about your customers and accurately segment your client base.

1) Behavioral

Your existing customers can tell you a lot about what your future customers will want. Whether you’re trying to attract new customers or encourage repeat business from loyal ones, you need to get a glimpse into the way that your customers think and behave.

Even if you’re familiar with your demographic, you want to glean more information over time in order to ensure that you’re staying current with their wants and needs. For example, if you’re targeting your product for teens studying for the SATs, you may want to learn more about the studying habits of girls versus boys or how the type of university that each student desires to attend impacts their study style.

Learning this information will help you to target your visual ads, products and promotions to each customer segment, which will ultimately help you to attract more customers and land more sales.

2) eMail

You can gather a lot of demographic information by researching your market segments through online tools and census information. If you’re trying to target a certain neighbourhood for an amazing carryout deal you’re running from one of your restaurant locations, this type of information is helpful for promoting to that group through an email campaign.

Email campaigns are also a useful way to gauge customer interest. Running split testing or A/B testing with changes in headlines, copy or email graphics allows you to see what is and is not working to your customer segments. You can use metrics through your email delivery service to see who’s clicking through on your graphics, like a super timely call-to-action button or a sales banner that offers 20% off of a future purchase. Many email software offer drag n drop email templates you use to design your own emails. For free accounts and their affordable $10/mo account we’ve found mailchimp has the most features and usability.

3) Segmentation Maps

Segmentation maps are the interactive format for viewing information about your demographic based on their geographic location. Segmentation maps can show you how many women and men live in the area, what their ages are, how many children each family has, etc.

As mentioned above, this information is largely gathered from publicly available census information however, you can easily develop your own segmentation maps based on information that your own customers provide. Perhaps your company exists mostly online and you notice that customers in Montana are mostly women who often order knit hats for their loved ones during the holiday season. Overlay your existing customer data on top of geo location maps, based on the match rate – see what areas have a large percentage of your people like your existing customers….nice segway to point #4

4) Lookalike Modeling

Lookalike modelling involves creating customer models based off of real life customers you’ve worked with in the past. This “ideal customer” or customer profile gives you a mythical name and face of the customer you’re trying to reach with your products, campaigns and promotions.

Lookalike modelling is both a science and an art that involves gathering static details, like demographic info and product numbers from past order. It also includes voluntary feedback from your customers, perhaps through a follow-up survey that is administered after they make a purchase.

Graphic design plays a part here too, as you can create fun and interactive surveys and response modules for your customers to participate in. You can also use design to develop a portrait of your ideal customer and/or tables and models of the types of things that this customer likes, doesn’t like, and so forth. A well thought out lookalike model can be particularly useful in training modules for new employees and as a prop for meetings with the marketing team.

5) Remarketing/Targeting

There is a common belief in marketing that the best customer is a repeat customer. Repeat customers are great for your brand because they have a level of self-motivated buy in with your brand and are loyal to your products or services. Generating repeat business is also cheaper than finding new leads, so keeping your existing customers engaged is crucial for your bottom line.

Remarketing involves picking up where your customer leaves off. Did a customer login, fill a cart and leave it behind? Remind them of the awesome benefits they’ll miss out on by not completing their order. It’s pretty amazing how specific we can get when customizing advertisements in re-targeting. As an example, through facebook you can target down to the specific person and you can get very creative building graphic design specifically for 1 person (and for that person it also may be a little too ‘Big Brother’ creepy). So we suggest keeping your re-marketing message directed towards common customer behaviour segments like above. Our Unlimited Design Packages enables you the flexibility to build a variety of variations to any marketing campaign with 1 predictable flat fee, keeping your graphic design budget on budget!