Can you imagine an omnichannel marketing campaign fueled with data that identifies the unique characteristics of each and every household?
As marketers, we strive to obtain a 360-degree of the consumers we’re communicating to, but often times it’s easier said than done. So how can we locate a dataset that will perform the best for our campaigns when we’re surrounded by 40 trillion gigabytes of data?
By using segmentation to find the audience niche that’s best for your brand. Let’s explore further.
Improving old-school segmentation
Segmentation is a marketing technique used to define and divide the marketplace into clearly identifiable groups that share similar characteristics, needs, wants or demands. It’s a data strategy marketers have used for decades.
At Epsilon, we’ve developed Niches 5.0, a powerful segmentation or clustering system that classifies every household in our national consumer marketing file TotalSource Plus® into one of 26 meaningful groups.
Niches’ comprehensive profiles takes the whole consumer into account, including demographics, financials, insurance preferences, vehicle ownership, lifestyles and interests, geographic concentrations, spend categories and merchants, travel, media usage, and attitudes and preferences.
Brands leverage these niches, such as Big Spender Parents, IRA Spenders, Mid-Life Munchkins and Young at Heart, to identify the best audiences for their campaigns and create personalized messages/campaigns that enhance the consumer experience.
Benefits of using niches versus traditional segmentation
Traditional methods of segmentation served as a great foundation, but with niche-level data, your marketing can go even further. Niches 5.0 goes beyond the average segmentation because it:
Assigns data to households (versus predicting)
We have actual data inputs about consumers and can ‘assign’ these facts to the specific segments; whereas less sophisticated datasets would only make predictions about consumers. We evaluate all of the demographic, financial and transactional data to elicit the strongest data facts and put them to use in niche segmentation.
Is cost effective and efficient
It’s quality versus quantity. Leveraging the right data saves marketers thousands of dollars in campaign waste. With Niches 5.0, you can easily hone in on the one million households that fit your criteria from the 125 million households available on our national consumer-marketing file.
Additionally, Niches 5.0 is cost effective as it’s an off-the-shelf product and doesn’t drastically change over time. It follows the customer throughout her lifecycle and provides a current composite of buying behaviors and interests.
Helps you craft communications, with emphasis on personalization
Niches 5.0 helps you to establish a 360-degree view of your customers. Additionally, the dataset easily integrates into analytical applications by feeding into algorithms, allowing them to access comprehensive information via a single TotalSource Plus data element.
With this enhanced view, the shift from generic to personalized communications becomes a reality. Marketers strive to communicate to their customers on a personal level. With accurate data as the primary driver, you can create that holistic customer experience that’s personalized with the best choice for individuals across all points of interactions.
Success with Niches
Niches has been bringing success to marketing programs for years. Why? Because, it’s all about real humans versus inferences. Niches has been used successfully for both targeting and creative messaging efforts across all verticals.
Case in point, in the rapidly changing media and communications industry, Niches is actively used to identify the best customers and prospect audiences for evolving technology, such as the consumer movement in the shift from cable and satellite to a wide range of streaming options. Niches is intrinsic in developing tailored appeals based on life cycle stages and interests.
So as you evaluate your data strategy, start off by ensuring you have the right people (data strategists and scientists) in place to help you make sense of all the data and select the niche that’s best for you. And make sure to find a partner who offers tried and true datasets; one in which you can trust and who demonstrates transparency.