Developed during my work on marketing automation systems at Kentico and refined through implementation at News & Media Holding (N&MH) and my own startups at LTTR/CORP. This framework helps growth hackers systematically segment customer behaviour, optimise conversion funnels, and scale marketing automation effectively.
Guide to behavioural segmentation
What is it good for?
- To document a digital marketing strategy
- To get business performance in one picture
- To get marketing, sales, and product people on the same page
- To easily understand and implement digital transformation
1. Analyse customer journey
Once you have defined the customer journey, look for the following information.
- What are the customer goals on every step of the journey?
- What actions do customers perform on every touch point towards the goal of fulfilment?
- Which of those actions is possible to record and how?
2. Set up the funnel
The funnel, in this case, is a representation of the customer journey. It can be used to validate the qualitative data of the customer journey. Every step of the funnel is a segment, and the funnel metrics represent the segment performance.
Congratulations, you have created your first performance-based target groups. Now you can better target your communication and optimise your business model.
Note: In a simplified explanation, the business activities aim to attract customers from a previous segment and move them to the next segment.
3. Slice the funnel longitudinally
The segmentation is most probably not that simple. Customers don't behave like sheep, and there are nuances that, sooner or later, must be addressed individually.
For instance:
- Customers might come with entirely different motivations; therefore, they will hear a different message.
- The customer tried the product, but her motivation was not escalated enough to perform a further conversion, and now she is back.
- Customers skip a certain action, so it seems like no retention or activation.
- Customers skip a certain action, so it seems like no retention or activation.
Suggested records to track
- Page visit source, or acquisition source
- Product interactions
- Number of visits
- Email signups or social network follows
- User forum posts
- Support requests
Now we can target campaigns on specific segments: optimise ongoing campaigns and sales, or optimise the product itself. If the sources are limited, the team can easily decide where to focus its sources.
Visual representation of each segment enables
- Quick overview of the current performance state.
- Look of each campaign influenced the segments around.
- Compare the performance cohorts through the journey