Three obstacles keep coming up when we speak with brand marketers: customer segmentation “strategy” that never leaves the deck or get to activation, models that can’t keep pace with how customers actually behave, and losing potential customers before you ever see them. In our recent Summer Series webinar Carly Napoli, Vice President of Solutions at Resonate, used the session to discuss how brands are tackling each of these and shared real client results.
Here are the three biggest takeaways from the session.
Takeaway 1: A Segmentation Deck
Isn’t a Segmentation Strategy
Most segmentation projects end the same way: a consulting group delivers a polished PDF, and the PDF sits in a folder. Napoli named the problem directly: “The insights don’t necessarily drive conversion if you don’t have that connective tissue, if it’s not refreshing at the cadence you need, or if you can’t actually find the individuals defined in those segments.”
The fix isn’t a better deck. It’s a different deliverable entirely. Napoli discusses Resonate’s four-step process (scope, collect, match and enrich, then activate) to change your approach. While it still ends with the report brand teams expect, it also appends a segment label to every individual record. As Napoli explained, “Not only will we give you a report that has a match rate, a segment count, the differentiating attributes, all of the data you need to build that go-to-market strategy against each of these segments; we’re also going to make it actionable.”
Actionable, in this case, means the segments plug into a CRM for direct mail and email, live in SSPs and DSPs for paid media, and show up in social platforms for targeting. One financial services client used this approach to build five distinct customer segments from psychographic data instead of broad demographic cohorts, then tested those segments against their existing targeting in an email campaign. The open rate went up 15% in the first campaign.
The bigger shift is speed. Traditional segmentation projects take months and are sometimes only rebuilt once a year (if at all). Resonate delivers segments in two weeks, with a refresh cadence built in, so brands aren’t making decisions off consumer behavior that’s already six months stale.
Takeaway 2: Finding Your Next-Best Customer Means Moving as Fast as They Do
Segmentation tells you who your customers are. The next question is which ones matter most right now, and that’s where static models fall apart. Napoli described the core issue brands usually face, including “a lot of deterministic data, but missing that movement in behaviors to allow people to fall in and out of those models more effectively.”
Most brands have strong data on customers who are already customers. What they’re missing is a read on how those customers are shifting, and a way to act on it before the shift shows up in the numbers. Resonate’s approach scores every customer on a 1-10 scale using deciles, so marketing teams know exactly who to prioritize, who to suppress, and where the budget actually pays off.
A travel and entertainment brand put this into practice after months of trying to adjust their strategy based on past customer behavior, an approach that couldn’t keep up with how fast travel preferences were shifting. By combining their first-party data with Resonate’s behavioral and intent signals, they saw 15% higher conversions, a 62% reduction in cost per view, and 117% higher landing page views.
That’s the pattern across the board: pair what you already know about a customer with a live read on what they’re likely to do next, and the return shows up at every stage, from who clicks to who converts.
Takeaway 3: You Can Know a Customer Before They Ever Raise Their Hand
Personalization used to require a returning customer. If someone showed up on a brand’s website for the first time, that brand was working with almost nothing, at best some geodata but not much else. Resonate closes that gap using its 250-million-profile Install file, matched against a customer’s chosen identifier (a hashed email, mobile ad ID, or IP address), so brands can recognize and personalize for a first-time visitor before that visitor does anything at all.
A financial services provider proved out exactly this. Before, they could personalize for 8% of first-time site visitors, essentially anyone they already had some identifying data on. After deploying the Install, that number jumped to 53%. Personalized experiences reached 88% of all site visitors at some point in their journey, and 20% converted to a premium product, and their customer journey was faster than the brand had seen before.
The Install carries the same segments and next-best customer scores from the first two takeaways, so a brand isn’t just recognizing a first-time visitor. It’s recognizing which segment they belong to and how valuable they’re likely to be, in the same instant. Napoli framed the shift plainly: it lets brands “see the customers that you don’t have a relationship with yet,” turning a cold visit into a targeted one before the visitor even knows they’ve been seen.
Where to Start
Napoli’s advice for prioritizing between these three: start with your biggest constraint. If you’re launching something new and need a go-to-market foundation, start with segmentation. If customer lifetime value is the real problem, next-best customer modeling comes first. If acquisition cost is climbing because you’ve maxed out your existing audience, the Install is built to extend your addressable market rather than just make your current audience more efficient.
Missed the live session? You can catch the whole thing on-demand right now. The next installment of Resonate’s Summer Series covers the top five ways independent agencies stay competitive, so join us on Wednesday, August 12 to catch it live.
And if your brand is staring down one of these obstacles, maybe we can help. Reach out directly to talk through which of these three approaches fits your team’s biggest challenge right now.
