Help Center

Using Segmentation with Customer Emails Use Case

Using segmentation with customer emails is vital for businesses seeking to deliver personalized experiences that drive conversions. Simply relying on basic customer information or past purchases limits the effectiveness of campaigns. A more powerful approach is unifying this data with real-time behavioral insights, such as browsing habits or content engagement. By enriching customer data and building dynamic, multidimensional segments, you can tailor your outreach to better match individual interests and behaviors, improving customer engagement and conversion rates.

BlueConic facilitates this by creating unified profiles that combine customer data from various sources, including CRM, ESP, and on-site interactions. These profiles continuously update in real-time, allowing you to segment customers based on up-to-date behaviors and preferences. With BlueConic's segmentation capabilities, you can easily target the right audience at the right time, sharing dynamic segments with email service providers (ESPs) to boost email performance and deliver more meaningful, personalized customer experiences.

Value-Based Outcome

All BlueConic use cases are associated with one or more Value-Based Outcomes, which are defined areas of focus that help you measure the value of a CDP to your overall business. This use case can be closely related to the Value-Based Outcome of Smarter Customer Engagement.

Case Studies

Before You Begin

Before you begin implementing cart abandonment mitigation tactics, make sure you are familiar with what a CDP use case is and all of the components that will make yours more successful. Once this is done, you can start defining your “Before You Begin” requirements, which includes identifying key stakeholders and target audiences, gathering data sources and credentials, and defining what success looks like.

For this use case, example “Before You Begin” requirements may look something like this:

Key stakeholders: Email marketing team
Target audience: Visitors to your channels that are recently engaging in a particular interest(s), but have not yet made a purchase
Data types: Online browsing behavior, interests, consent and contact information
Platforms: Campaign management platform or email service provider
Measurement and ROI: Email open and clickthrough rates

Use Case Configuration Steps

Step one: Collect data

Set up a BlueConic Listener

BlueConic Listeners enable you to enhance profiles with browsing and behavioral data that provide enriched profiles, for even more targeted activations. For this use case, we will use the Interest Ranker 2.0 Listener, which allows BlueConic to identify interests of your visitors in real time.

Navigate to the Listeners tab of the platform and click the Add Listener button. In the gallery, choose the Interest Ranker 2.0 and the configuration page will open.
Give your new listener a name and Save it.
Now, select the channel(s) you want to track visitor interests on. You can either leave this as all pages on all channels or create rules that allow you to collect interests on certain pages based on URL, meta tags, or selecting an area on the page.
After you've selected your channels, you will identify what interests you want to select by choosing one of these three options:
- Detect any interest - Listens for any interest
- Collect specific interests - Listens only for interests added to the allow list
- Exclude certain interests - Listens to any interests except for the ones added to the block list
Next, you will define how customer interests will be captured. This can be done in a variety of ways or combinations, including meta tags, natural language processing, JavaScript, etc. For this use case, we will choose meta tag keywords.
After you've determined your capturing method, you will want to map which profile properties that interests will be stored in. You have the option to create new profile properties directly within the listener or choose existing properties by name. When completing this step, keep in mind:
- It is recommended to choose to store the top 3 or 5 interests in the same profile property. If you choose to only store the top interest, you are limited in how robust and multi-dimensional your segments will be.
- You can apply a decay period for how long an interest is stored in a profile property (i.e. 30, 60, 90 or 365 days). This allows you to segment on the recency of visitors interests over various time periods.
- Optionally, you can set a threshold for how many points a visitor needs to qualify the interest to be stored on their profile. For example, a page load could be 2 points, scrolling 50% of a page could be 4 points, and filling out a form could be 6 points. If you set the threshold to be 8 points, an interest will only be stored on a profile when they reach that engagement number.
Test your listener setup by clicking the See collected interests button to list how interests are being collected based on the rules and settings you have configured.

Build your segments

Now that your listener is active, you can build your segments for this use case.

Navigate to the Segments tab of the platform and click the Add Segment button. Give your new segment a name.
Now, you can set conditions that define the rules that customers must meet to be included. For this example, we will set up a segment for customers who have visited your channel in the last 30 days, shown interest in a specific product, and not made a purchase.
- Click the select condition dropdown and choose Profile. A list with all available profile properties will appear in a pop-up window. Select the property that is storing channel visits and pick the range of within the last 30 days.
- Use the "AND" operator and click the select condition dropdown and choose Profile again. Select the property that is storing customer interests (from the Interest Ranker 2.0 listener that was created). Then select the specific product interests you want to segment on. For this example, "shoes" and "cell phones" are the selected interests.
- Use the "AND" operator and click the select condition dropdown and choose Profile again. Select the property that is storing purchase history data, such as last order information. This is likely coming from a connection. Configure the condition to include profiles that have this value empty.
Save your segment.

Step two: Activate data

Now that you have the data collecting and progressively segmenting, you will activate upon this data using a BlueConic Connection to an email service provider or campaign management platform. When determining which connection is best for you, ask yourself the following questions:

What platform am I currently using to email my customers?
How often do I want to be able to export my segment audience for activation?
What segments and/or profile properties are required for export?
Is exporting timeline events required to support my activation strategy?

For this use case, the Mailchimp Connection will be used as an example.

Navigate to the Connections tab of the platform and click the Add Connection button. In the gallery, choose the Mailchimp Connection and the configuration page will open.
Give your new connection a name and Save it.
On the Set up and run page, authenticate your Mailchimp account by clicking the Connect with Mailchimp button. A pop-up window will appear that takes you through the authentication process.
Now, add an export goal by clicking the Add goal button and choosing "Export data into Mailchimp."
In step one of the export goal, select the segment you just created.
Then, select one or more Mailchimp audience lists to export BlueConic data to. This should be the audience list(s) you want to use for sending emails your customers.
To properly export your data to the selected audience list, link the email address field that should be used to match BlueConic profiles to Mailchimp subscribers.
Once the identifiers are mapped, you can select any other profile properties that should be sent to Mailchimp fields and set mapping rules.
Optionally, you can allow BlueConic to create new Mailchimp subscribers if no existing match is found or to remove subscribers from Mailchimp audiences when they no longer belong to your selected segment.
Once you're done configuring your export goal, save your connection and switch it to On.
Navigate back to the Set up and run page of the connection and scroll down to the Run history section.
- To start the export manually, click the Run now button.
- To schedule the export for a future date, click the Settings icon. Select how to schedule the import by choosing an option from the drop-down list:
  - Number of times per day
  - Days of the week
  - Days of the month
  - Weekday of the month

Once a connection is established to export BlueConic data to a campaign management platform or email service provider (ESP), such as Mailchimp, the rest of the activation process takes place within that platform. BlueConic enables seamless data transfer, exporting your personalized customer segments based on real-time behavioral and profile data. From there, you can use these dynamic segments directly within the ESP to create and personalize emails tailored to specific customer groups. The emails, leveraging the segmented data from BlueConic, are then sent through the ESP, ensuring relevant and targeted communications are delivered to the right audiences at the right time.

Step three: Measure outcomes

A critical element of executing any use case is understanding the KPIs against which the results will be measured. For a segmented emails use case, the most common metrics are email open rates and clickthrough rates. However, you may also want to track your segments and their growth over time using the Segment Over Time Insight. Additionally, you can set a growth KPI for your segments and track against that goal using the Segment KPI Insight.