etailology

I recently answered a question about customer segmentation on LinkedIn Answers, and figured I’d share my comments here as well:

There are multiple ways to capture segmentation data (not the least of which is to buy it from data-warehousing companies). In terms of data supplementation driven from your site itself, some can be driven through your campaign management system (e.g. clicking on this type of promo identifies a user as part of X segment)… but it’s also generally easy to segment customers through email marketing efforts.

You are right to think hard about segmentation. Many of my clients build complex campaign management systems only later to realize that they lack the segmentation knowledge which is needed to bring those systems to life. Closing the loop between campaign response and customer profiles is often the most fertile source of segmentation data.

Lastly, it’s important that your site engineered in a way which makes best use of the segmentation data you possess, without restricting future expansion or feature creation. This is of particular importance to multi-billion-dollar firms since so much integration is required with backend systems — and that integration is often mandated under less than ideal conditions with less than ideal technologies.