Dynamic Segmentation

What are dynamic segments in marketing?

Dynamic segmentation is a marketing practice that involves dividing your customer database into different groups (or segments) based on needs, interests, characteristics and more.

Unlike standard marketing audience segments, dynamic segments populate and update in real-time based on key customer behaviors. For example, if a customer purchases a certain amount within a set period, they could be added to a dynamic segment for loyal customers. Conversely, if they don’t make a purchase for a number of months, they might be automatically added to a dynamic segment for “customers likely to churn.”

By using marketing audience segmentation to separate customers into distinct segments, businesses can target them more closely to increase engagement, drive personalization and drive sales.

Popular data points for dynamic segmentation

Dynamic segments help brands get the most out of their customer, sales and product data. Some of the most common data-points to build dynamic segments around include:

Customer status
(customer vs non-customer)
Repeat customers:
who regularly shop with you
Overall lifecycle status
Product affinity:
which products customers purchase most often
Preferred marketing channel
Churn likelihood:
customers who aren’t engaging with content or offers
Inactive customers:
who have not made a purchase for a set period of time
Average Order Value (AOV)
Customer Lifetime Value
VIP customers:
who often have a high AOV and purchase frequency
Serial returners:
customers that frequently buy and return products

Benefits of dynamic segmentation

Using dynamic segmentation to power your marketing comes with many benefits:

Increased ROI:
By targeting specific audiences with personalized messages, marketers can maximize the return on investment from their campaigns.
Improved brand loyalty:
By understanding customer segments and providing tailored campaigns and offers to each segment, as well as highlighting shared values and interests across the different segments, brands can foster loyalty.
Increased engagement:
Targeting a specific audience with content that speaks directly to them helps increase engagement with that audience. This can lead to better click-through rates, higher conversions, improved sales and greater customer satisfaction.
Improved relevancy:
Targeting customers based on segmentation allows marketers to develop marketing campaigns that are more relevant to their target audience and more likely to be successful.
Reduced time investment:
Manual segmentation can be a serious time drain on marketers – especially with multiple datasets at play. Once set up, dynamic segments run in the background with minimal manual input needed, helping brands to harness the full power of their data without a dedicated data team.