Function documentationSegmentation

 

Businesses compete today in an increasingly customer-oriented market. Marketing departments must strive to gather as much information as possible on their customer base, and must use this information to direct more personalized marketing activities. More comprehensive and precise information about customers (for example, clickstream analysis) has significantly extended the options for marketing.

To enable selective marketing, you classify your business partners into different target groups on the basis of certain shared marketing-relevant attributes (for example, age, occupation, hobbies, income, and so on). You can then tailor your marketing activities to the requirements of the individual target groups, thus making your product and service offers more attractive.

Integration

Segmentation is required in most marketing scenarios, especially in campaign management and loyalty management.

Prerequisites

You have made the settings in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management, under Start of the navigation path Marketing Next navigation step Segmentation End of the navigation path.

Features

Which functions you use for segmentation depends on the size of your data volume and what type of information you are using in your segmentation activities. Various data sources are available for the attribute lists.

Classic segmentation with a normal data volume is suited to segmentation activities involving up to 500,000 business partners.

Segmentation with high data volume is suited to segmentation activities involving more than 500,000 business partners. You can also segment marketing prospects. To use data from SAP NetWeaver BW, you can define a CSV file as a data source for your attribute lists. For more information, see Segmentation with High Data Volume.

You can segment the following data:

  • Business partners

  • Business partners based on relationships

  • Business partners based on objects

  • Products

  • Marketing prospects (only for segmentation with high data volume)

During segmentation you work with the following segmentation elements:

  • Segmentation model

    A segmentation model is a group of segments and/or target groups that were modeled together or that are to be interpreted together, for example, because they are all connected to a particular marketing campaign.

    A segmentation model can be based on a segmentation basis.

    A segmentation model is a hierarchical structure containing one or more branches, and is read and processed from top to bottom.

  • Segment

    A segment is the logical description of a number of business partners using filters (attributes and attribute values) and modeling actions. The segment contains the criteria according to which the business partners are to be selected and subsequently combined in target groups. A segment is one branch of the segmentation model when read from top to bottom.

  • Segmentation basis

    A segmentation basis is not a static list of business partners but rather a combination of filters, which can be modeled and saved just like a segment. This ensures that when modeling target groups, you do not work with an outdated list of business partners as your segmentation basis, but rather the number of currently available business partners is restricted for the user by using filters.