Without extensive customer data, every CRM is nothing but a digital Rolodex. As a rule of thumb, the more data you gather about your customers the better informed your decisions will be. But beyond leads profiles and customers’ names lies a whole world of more detailed data. With this in mind, however, another problem surfaces: Organization.

From social media hashtags to HTML tags, Tags serve as the internet’s infrastructure. They organize information into sub-groups and make archiving and searching history a matter of few clicks. In addition, the endless possibilities of integrating Data and communicating it between different platforms are what make the Internet such a fertile space for innovation.

CRM segmentation using Tags works in a similar fashion. Although the segmentation techniques might differ from business to business, they rely on one shared premise:  Not all customers are the same.

Let us explore further why and how every business should implement effective CRM segmentation.

Why Implement Segmentation:

Knowing your Customers

Well managing customers’ relationships depends on better knowing your customers.  The more customer data you can populate your CRM with, the easier it will become to distinguish each customer and also group them with similar ones.

For example, you can segment customers or leads based on the following criteria:

• Gender
• Age groups
• Purchasing Power
• Spending Habits
• Interests gathered from questionnaires or social media.

Now, you might ask yourself: If a business should not treat customers the same then wouldn’t sub-grouping them be counter-productive? Our next point illustrates why the answer is a no.

Related: 4 Traits of a Trustworthy Customer Relationship Management Platform

Better Targeted Campaigns

Current and potential customers come with a lot of distinctive characteristics.  When you have a few customers, it is much easier to manage them separately from one another. But, as the number of your customers grows, the cloud of data (or tags) that represents each one starts to overlap with other ones. Now is when the need to sub-group customers arises.

With well-categorized customer groups, generic campaigns leave a way for effective targeted marketing and sales campaigns. It is the reason why “6 out of 10 small businesses are using their CRM for email marketing” according to MarketingCharts.com and why CRMS are known to increase sales and, consequently, customer retention.

Data Integration

Now that you have populated your CRM database with rich data, where do you go from here?

The free flow of data throughout your business should be the ideal goal. CRM segmentation can take relevant data from customer service through sales and marketing and deliver it all the way to development and key execs. The data that you have collected and properly processed using segmentation can prove an invaluable asset for other departments in identifying demands, improving your products and even adjusting your pricing strategy.

Furthermore, integration can help your analysts devise more accurate metrics and forecasting methods. In the case of CRMs equipped with such tools, like Teamgate, segmentation complements native analytics nicely.

How to Segment:

Identify a specific goal

One of Big Data’s biggest problems is data clutter. In his book “The Signal and The Noise”, statistician Nate Silver refers to the challenge of “extracting signal from noise” as a hindrance to making accurate predictions from large data sets.

The same challenge presents itself for CRM users when collecting and segmenting customer data. The solution is to prevent the occurrence of noise in the first place by planning a CRM segmentation strategy.

When you identify a high priority goal like increasing sales in a particular demographic or 20% more customer retention, identifying the data relevant to the goal becomes an easy task. There won’t be a need for arbitrary customer sub-groups that serve no purpose but to add noise to already well-categorized data.

When a particular segmentation strategy meets your pre-determined results, you can choose to allocate more resources towards different goals.

This strategy is akin to the OKR method which stands for Objective & Key Result. OKR is currently in use to great successes by technology giants such as Google, Intel and Twitter.  Make sure to explore it further (or implement it) for your CRM segmentation strategies.

Teamgate Tags

Teamgate CRM allows you to not only tag leads and customers but also deals and companies, which adds to the latters the same level of complexity usually allocated to customers.

Tagging using Teamgate is easy and intuitive to deploy for any segmentation strategy.

To create a Tag:

• Navigate to Settings > Customize > Tags.
• Choose Contacts (for Customers, Leads and Companies) or Deals.
• Click Add New and enter a clear and relevant tag.
• Save

Congrats! You have created your first tag. Editing tags can be done using the same tab by clicking on the Tag you want to edit.

Teamgate segmentation or tagging will help you implement and deploy targeted sales and marketing campaigns that work while keeping the satisfaction of your customers a priority.