How to perform customer segmentation in Marketing Cloud - Part 1/2

Segmentation is based on dividing your audience so that you can address it with more personal and relevant messages. This is what is known in Marketing as sending the right message to the right person at the right time.

Traditionally in Marketing when we talk about segmentation, we divide customers into groups based on different attributes. For example, a customer may belong to our VIP customer group or may live in a certain geographic area. However, in Marketing Cloud, in addition to customer attributes, you can also segment by customer behavior, for example, the type of interaction a customer has with our brand. It is also possible to segment by time, for example when a customer has interacted with us.

In a report on connected customers, Salesforce showed that approximately 63% of millennials and 58% of generation X want to share personal information with companies if they get personalized offers or discounts in return. On the other hand, 52% of customers who do not receive personalized emails decide not to interact with them, so it’s proven that applying correct segmentation provides the following advantages:

Increased conversion rates
Greater content delivery capacity
Higher percentage of interactions
Higher quality of email analysis
And lower unsubscription rate

When creating campaign strategies, Marketing Cloud offers various ways to segment our customers' data. There are different tools within the platform, for example Data Filters, SQL Activities or Group Lists.

Data Filters are a tool for filtering existing data in Marketing Cloud.
By creating a new Data Filter you will be able to tailor your audience to a more specific set of subscribers.
We can carry out a segmentation using customer attributes, for example, where they live, the type of product they’ve bought, if they’re a VIP customer, etc., but we can also segment according to digital interactions and combine the two, for example, a VIP customer that has opened one of our emails in the last 3 months. This way we obtain a more precise segmentation.
At the same time, one of the functionalities that this tool provides is that it can create an autonomous filter definition applicable to different lists of subscribers or Data Extensions.

On the other hand, Data Filters can segment different relational Data Extensions when they have a unique identifier in common designated as the Primary Key. This is known as a Data Relationship. Keep in mind that applying a Data Filter on more than 2 relational Data Extensions has its limitations. In this case, if you want to filter more than 2 Data Extensions, the recommended option is an SQL Activity.

SQL Activities are used in the case that you need to segment one or multiple Data Extensions at the same time or retrieve data associated with several Data Extensions. This option allows creating SQL queries through an activity, generating a specific and more advanced segmentation. At the same time, you can schedule this query activity from a calendar in Automation Studio which means that it will be automated based on our workflow and preferences.
The use of this tool will depend on the experience and knowledge that you have on writing queries in SQL databases.

Group Lists are another segmentation tool in the case that you are dealing with a list of subscribers. This option allows you to filter your subscribers according to their attributes, for example, first name, last name, email, etc., or from filters with more specific attributes that have already been created. This is one of the simplest segmentation tools to use within Marketing Cloud. Likewise, you can create random groups of subscribers, which randomly select subscribers from a list.

Our recommendation is that you think carefully about what type of data you want to segment, the audience you want to target, and how you want to manage the filtered data. With these three points in mind, you can choose between the different tools that Marketing Cloud offers.

In the following table we will show you the main characteristics when using each of these segmentation tools:

Usability of the tools

The easiest and fastest tools to use in Marketing Cloud are Data Filters and Group Lists.
SQL queries are a more complex tool and you must have knowledge of the query language.

Typology of segmented data

To create a segmentation in one or two relational Data Extensions, you can use a Data Filter or SQL Activity

In the case that you want to segment multiple Data Extensions at the same time, you can use SQL queries.

If you want to filter a list of subscribers, you can use a Group List or a Data Filter

Features in Automation Studio

When applying segmentation filters in Automation Studio, you can do it with Data Filter or an SQL query.