A guide to designing and using robust persona segmentation to support rich, data-driven customer journeys that bolster CX from targeted acquisition through personalized member experiences
Katie Lukas
September 10, 2024
Persona segmentation is an underused tool, especially within the payer sector. Done correctly, a robust segmentation can connect your entire organization’s marketing, customer experience, and analytics practices in powerful ways. It offers not just deep insights into your audiences — but provides significant competitive advantages and new ways to uphold customer centricity.
1. Start with a rich dataset based on real research
Many segmentations only tell part of the story: prospects only, current members only, limited datasets, or no primary research. To develop a true and deep persona segmentation that will support your organization for years to come, invest in both qualitative and quantitative research with a combined sample of prospects and your own members. This approach ensures a holistic view of the audience, enabling segmentation that is deeply rooted in reality. Such a dataset provides the foundation for a sustainable strategy that offers insights into both broad trends and individual behaviors.
2. Create and refine your segmentation model
Your data scientists should be partners in assessing the best segmentation model for your customers and your organization. Insights abound even at the earliest stages of this process. To reach the best segmentation model involves choosing the most salient questions out of the quantitative research, bringing clarity to exactly what differentiates your audience. This process requires continuous refinement to ensure the model remains relevant and aligned with organizational goals. A well-crafted model not only clarifies distinctions within the audience but also drives targeted strategies that resonate with specific segments.
3. Develop actionable personas from the segmentation
Personas can be built in many different ways — some are better than others. For personas to work for your organization, they must be actionable, demonstrating clear and immediate steps and priorities that will connect with your audiences. They should include information to support media targeting (media consumption, device preferences, channels, frequency) as well as experience-driven data, such as how a persona prefers to engage, what they are interested in, and how healthy they are. This depth of information allows for personalized engagement strategies that meet the audience where they are, enhancing the overall customer experience.
4. Build journey maps around each persona
Most modern marketers are familiar with journey maps and what a critical tool they are. Multiply that value when journey maps are built on data-driven personas. A robust persona segmentation provides your journey maps with connectivity to real people and their objectively determined needs, wants, frustrations, and challenges — and provides your organization with the perspective to support those people throughout their journey. By doing so, organizations can ensure that every touchpoint is meaningful and aligned with customer expectations, leading to improved satisfaction and loyalty.
5. Use your journey maps and personas to identify and prioritize opportunities
Your new personas and journey maps should become tools that are used in the daily life of your organization. The process of developing your maps will highlight multiple opportunities and challenges for your teams to address. These opportunities should form the basis for roadmap and feature planning, personalization, CRM, and your end-to-end member experience. Having persona-driven maps allows you to connect each of these touchpoints back to lived experiences and statistically significant data.
6. Connect your analytics to key moments in the journeys
Journey-based measurement opens up when you have an established set of personas and journeys. Assess new site visitors and existing members based on behavior patterns and assign them to a segment. Now you can analyze how they interact with your platforms and create learning agendas to improve that engagement, enhance member experience, exceed acquisition goals, and elevate your brand’s conversations with your audiences.
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