Meaning & use
customer segmentation
Last updated
Meanings
noununcountablebusiness
The practice of dividing a company's customers into groups that share similar needs, habits, or value.
Grammar: No plural and no 'a' before it: customer segmentation is a way of working, not a single thing you can count.
Patterns
- customer segmentation by age
- customer segmentation into groups
- use customer segmentation
- a customer segmentation strategy
The marketing team used customer segmentation to send different offers to younger and older buyers.
Good customer segmentation showed that most of the profit came from a small group of loyal shoppers.
Without customer segmentation, the company wasted money advertising to people who would never buy.
nouncountablebusiness
The set of groups produced when customers are sorted in this way.
Grammar: Used with a plural or 'a' when you mean the groups themselves: a segmentation, several segmentations.
Patterns
- a customer segmentation
- several customer segmentations
- the customer segmentation used by a company
Their customer segmentation puts buyers into four groups: bargain hunters, loyal fans, occasional shoppers, and new users.
The report compares two customer segmentations, one based on income and one based on shopping frequency.
Common combinations
- customer segmentation strategy
- A clear customer segmentation strategy helped the small shop compete with larger chains.
- market segmentation
- Market segmentation and customer segmentation are often discussed together in business classes.
- carry out customer segmentation
- The analysts carried out customer segmentation before designing the new app.
- customer segmentation model
- Their customer segmentation model groups people by how much they spend each year.
- benefits of customer segmentation
- The manager explained the benefits of customer segmentation to the sales team.
Synonyms and how they differ
- market segmentation
- Broader: it can split the whole market, including people who are not yet customers, while customer segmentation deals only with people who already buy.
- customer profiling
- Focuses on describing the typical buyer in detail rather than on dividing buyers into separate groups.
- targeting
- Comes after segmentation and means choosing which groups to aim at, so it is a later step, not the same idea.
Word family
- segment verb
- To divide something into separate parts.
- segment noun
- One of the parts into which something is divided.
- segmentation noun
- The general act of dividing something into parts, in any field.
- segmented adjective
- Divided into separate parts.
Commonly confused: customer segmentation or customer service? customer segmentation or market research?
customer segmentation vs customer service
Customer service means helping buyers with problems; customer segmentation is about sorting buyers into groups for marketing.
customer segmentation vs market research
Market research is the gathering of information about buyers; segmentation is what you do with that information to create groups.
Practice
The company used customer segmentation ______ its email list so that each group received a suitable offer.
Choose one answer.
'Use something to do something' needs the infinitive 'to organize'. 'Organizing' would need a different pattern, such as 'used customer segmentation for organizing', and 'for organize' is not grammatical.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “customer segmentation”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.