Segment your audience

Overview

Personalization of your web content is the natural amplification and progression of your marketing efforts, campaigns, and personalized mails. Personalization takes different shapes but is always customer-centric and related to audience segmentation. Segments represent your target audience types, or groups. For each segment, you define what you want the audience to achieve and according to the desired outcome, engage the target audience with tailored content, relevant for them and what you want them to accomplish. Thus, each segment is served with different content - different versions of a page.

You create user segments based on certain rules, audience behavior, demographics, phase in the customer journey, or other factors and criteria that apply to the users. You can define custom criteria and have any combination of AND/OR criteria to define your segments.

For more information, see User characteristics.

EXAMPLE: In your online shop, a visitor to your website is part of a segment, called Qualified Leads US once the visitor fulfills the following conditions and has the following characteristics:

• Location: Reside in US
• Role: Developer
• Visited: page Best productive laptops this year

In the same manner you can define, for example, a segment called Qualified Leads Europe or Front-end Developers, and so forth.

NOTE: To determine the location and the IP of a visitor, Sitefinity CMS uses GeoLite2 City databases. If you want to use a DB version that is newer than the one distributed with Sitefinity CMS, you can upgrade your GeoLite2-City.mmdb database on the Maxmind website.
To update the database file, perform the following:

1. Download the GeoLite2 City database in .mmdb format.
2. Replace the existing file in the App_Data/GeoLocation folder of your Sitefinity CMS solution with the file you have downloaded.
3. Restart your Sitefinity CMS application.

To help you determine the user segments and make sure they are not empty, you need to make a comprehensive audience analysis to draft your key personas and segments. Basically, user segments represent the different kinds of potential customers with various combination of characteristics or at different stages of their customer journey.