7 Types of Customer Attributes for Segmentation & Personalization

As ways to increase the relevance of your digital marketing campaigns, segmentation and personalization have evolved dramatically over the past decade or so. Indeed, they’ve come so far that simple personalization like addressing subscribers by their first name are now viewed as hollow gestures.

Today, consumers expect brands to use segmentation and personalization to demonstrate that they’re paying attention and truly understand who they are and what they’re interested in. Thankfully, brands have a wealth of potential data they can use to get closer to their customers and prospects.

In Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s latest Marketing Checklist, we share more than 170 customer attributes you can use to either send a segmented campaign or personalize a campaign. These attributes include seven different kinds of information. Let’s discuss each kind.

1. Demographic Attributes

These are attributes about who the person is. It includes their name, but also more actionable information such as their education level, age, credit scores, and marital status.

Demographic data also includes information about the people around your subscriber. For example, it could include the names, ages, and birthdays of partners, children, relatives, pets, managers, and co-workers.

While this data can be quite useful, especially for B2C marketers, it’s important to recognize that it is constantly changing as subscribers age and experience new life events. So, it’s important to ensure you have policies and strategies in place to consistently evaluate and update this information as the customer relationship advances. This can be as simple as asking the customer to verify information during a customer service call or within email, but can also entail monitoring for behavioral signals that might suggest a change.

2. Firmographic Attributes

These are attributes about the organization the customer or prospect works for. These include the organization’s name, locations, annual revenue, and scale of operations. For publicly traded companies, much of this information is public and freely available.

For B2B marketers, firmographic information is essential to account-based marketing. The firmographic attributes help business marketers and their sales teams understand if a particular business is a good fit for their offerings. Attributes like industry, headcount, and annual revenue, for example, are oftentimes used as key inputs in lead scoring models or as general filters in determining which prospects are most worth pursuing.

3. Technographic Attributes

These are attributes about the technology owned or used by the person or the organization they work for. This information can be used in a variety of ways, depending on the company.

For example, for B2B brands in the software or professional services industries, knowing an organization’s tech stack components would be central to their targeting and messaging strategy. 

Or in another example more applicable to every brand, understanding which email inbox apps or browsers your customers use may inform your email or web design practices as it often reveals what progressive enhancements are worth using. After all, it’s unlikely to make sense to use AMP for Email if, say, only 30% of your audience is reading your emails in Gmail or Yahoo Mail, which support it.

4. Geographic Attributes

These are attributes about where the customer or prospect is. These include the location of the person themselves or their primary home, office, vacation home, or other place, plus its climate and proximity to various points of interest.

Location data from IP addresses have historically been very useful in real time messaging channels like email, SMS, and push to drive customers to in-store experiences when they are nearby or to locate the customer for service offerings that are location-dependent. However, with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection now generalizing the location data received via subscribers’ IP addresses, collecting zip codes and preferred store locations during signup or via progressive profiling is more important than ever to continue offering location-based messaging.

For our most comprehensive advice on MPP, download our Definitive Guide to Adapting to Mail Privacy Protection.

5. Psychographic Attributes

These are attributes about why the person does things. They include their activities, interests, attitudes, values, lifestyle, and social status.

Psychographic attributes are one of the more challenging attributes to collect and act upon. After all, the motivators of an individual’s behavior can be fairly complex. These attributes are often derived from models that group individuals into various categories based on all attributes on hand. They are generally good at providing the marketer with an overall understanding of how to generally approach the customer, such as what offers or content they’re likely to find valuable.

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6. Behavioral Attributes

These are attributes about what the customer or prospect has done. They include an almost infinite array of actions, such as what they’ve purchased, what they’re subscribed to, their shopping behaviors, brand satisfaction, and balances they have.

The purchasing, carting, and browsing behaviors of your subscribers are some of the most useful and addressable attributes in digital marketing programs and are often drivers of high conversion rates. Using behavioral attributes to identify when someone is in-market and then responding in a relevant manner makes this type of data gold to marketers.

7. Social Influence Attributes

These are attributes about the reaction of others to the person’s posts, reviews, videos, and other content. They include the number of followers a person has on a platform, and the number of reactions, shares, and comments their posts generate.

These attributes are key to identifying influencers among your subscribers so you can treat them differently than your other subscribers. Also, by watching the messaging used by influencers, you can gain additional insights about what’s resonating with your audience so you can fine-tune your future messaging.

For the full list of more than 170 attributes, get the Segmentation & Personalization Ideas to Explore checklist via a free, no-form download.

Capturing more zero- and first-party data has become a priority for most brands as third-party cookies sunset and data privacy rules tighten. At the same time, the adoption of customer data platforms (CDPs) is making customer profiles not only more accurate, but more actionable across the entire organization so you can create more cohesive customer experiences. That means that now is a great time to take inventory of the customer attributes you currently have—and to what degree you’re leveraging them—and which attributes you’d like to start collecting and using.

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Need help improving your segmentation and personalization? Oracle Digital Experience Agency has hundreds of marketing and communication experts ready to help Oracle customers create stronger connections with their customers and employees, even if they’re not using an Oracle platform as the foundation of that experience. Our award-winning specialists can handle everything from creative and strategy to content planning and project management.

For help overcoming your challenges or seizing your opportunities, talk to your Oracle account manager, visit us online, or email us at OracleAgency_US@Oracle.com.