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Marketing without segmentation is a lot like shouting into a crowded room and hoping the right person hears you. Without a clear way to communicate in a noisy marketing environment, your message gets lost in the mix.
With segmentation, you can identify your target audience, speak to their needs, and deliver the right message at the right moment. Companies that use segmentation are 130% more likely to understand customer motivations, resulting in more effective campaigns and deeper audience relationships.
In this article, we’ll break down four of the most effective customer segmentation methods, when to use each, and how Experian’s audience solutions can help.
What is segmentation in marketing?
Segmentation is the process of splitting a large audience into smaller groups that share similar traits, like demographics, location, behavior, or firmographic characteristics. As a marketer, these segments enable you to choose channels, messaging, and offers that resonate with each group.
Whether you’re targeting new homeowners in Texas, loyalty shoppers in retail, or small business decision-makers in finance, segmentation helps you stand out to them and get results.
Why should marketers segment their audiences?
Effective audience segmentation fuels accuracy, performance, and personalization at scale. Here’s why you should invest your time and marketing budget in honing your audience segments.
Maximize your marketing ROI
Nobody wants to waste money talking to the wrong crowd. Using various methods of segmentation, you can focus on those who want to hear from you — and the payoff can be huge. For marketing channels like email, segmentation can drive up to 760% more revenue than non-segmented campaigns. The more targeted your message, the better the return.
Create a unified omnichannel strategy
Segmentation helps ensure that every channel, from email and social media to display, SMS, and direct mail, operates from the same playbook.
Once you define your target audience segments, you also need a trusted identity partner to sync them across platforms and environments. This ensures you can deliver consistent, personalized experiences at every touchpoint and your audience receives the same message in the proper context, regardless of where they engage.
Strengthen customer loyalty
Roughly 75% of consumers are loyal to brands that “get” them. When you strive to understand your customers, they’re more likely to stay. Segmentation enables you to personalize communications based on your target segment’s values, behaviors, or preferences, encouraging repeat business.
Expand into new markets
With segmentation, you can analyze existing customers to identify common traits and use that data to pinpoint similar groups in new regions or markets. For example, if your top customers are middle-class parents in suburban areas, you can target lookalike segments in other cities with tailored messaging.
This makes it easier to expand with confidence, knowing you’re reaching people who are more likely to convert.
Lower customer acquisition costs
Rather than forcing you to cast a wide net, segmentation enables you to focus your budget on high-potential audiences across channels, reduce acquisition costs, and minimize wasted spend on low-intent audiences.
Four segmentation methods and examples
Let’s look at four different methods of market segmentation. We’ll define each, share when to use them, and give real-world examples to help you apply them.
1. Demographic segmentation
Demographic segmentation breaks your audience into groups based on gender, income, age, education, marital status, occupation, and household size. It’s one of the most foundational segmentation methods because it’s easy to implement and often tied directly to buying behavior.
Demographic data makes it easier to get the tone, offer, and channel right from the start. And when you combine demographic segmentation with other segmentation methods, such as behavior or location, the impact multiplies.
When to use it
Use demographic segmentation when your product or service is clearly more relevant to people in a specific life stage, income bracket, or household type.
Among all methods of market segmentation, demographic data is often the easiest starting point. It’s especially effective for industries such as financial services, healthcare, education, retail, and others, where consumer needs change based on demographics.
Examples
As a real-world example, a health supplement company used Experian data to segment its ambassador program audience into four demographic groups based on lifestyle and household makeup. These included younger singles, value-seeking families, high-income spenders, and older empty nesters.
Applying these insights at registration allowed the brand to deliver personalized, channel-specific communications that boosted acquisition and retention. The approach led to stronger engagement and more meaningful customer connections.
2. Geographic segmentation
This method of market segmentation categorizes people by location, including country, region, state, city, zip code, or even climate. It’s a simple yet effective way to tailor your marketing, as location often influences everything from lifestyle and language to shopping habits and product needs. It’s most often used among brands with physical locations or region-specific campaigns.
Whether you’re promoting snow boots in Colorado or sunscreen in California, geographic segmentation helps you stay relevant to the local context.
When to use it
Geographic segmentation is ideal when your offer or message changes depending on climate, culture, availability, or local regulations. It’s also helpful for planning market expansion or testing the performance of different methods of market segmentation across regions.
Examples
One home furnishings retailer partnered with Experian to understand how customer needs varied across store locations. Using a mix of client data and Experian demographics, we segmented stores based on their surrounding customer base, like urban, white-collar shoppers in metro centers versus lower-income households in more remote cities.
These insights enabled the retailer to tailor inventory, marketing strategies, and ad copy for each store type, resulting in more relevant customer experiences.
3. Behavioral segmentation
Behavioral segmentation centers on how people live their lives — their interests, habits, and decision-making patterns. It includes factors like past purchases, engagement frequency, brand loyalty, product usage, browsing patterns, and responsiveness to offers or promotions.
Among all of the segmentation methods, this one provides insight into intent, helping you go beyond who your audience is to understand what they do. You can use behavioral insights to re-engage former customers with relevant offers, reward loyal buyers with personalized perks, or guide high-intent shoppers toward conversion with timely nudges.
When to use it
Behavioral segmentation is best when you want to personalize based on intent, habits, or engagement stage. It’s particularly useful for retention, reactivation, or cross-selling strategies.
Examples
In practice, a national big-box retailer partnered with Experian to better understand customer behavior during grocery store visits. The goal was to identify distinct “trip missions” that could drive category trial and increase basket size. We analyzed everything from basket contents to customer composition and segmented visits into 11 unique missions.
For example, the “All Aisles Online” segment represented large households (often homeowners with families) stocking up on household staples through online orders. In contrast, the “Marketable Mission” segment captured smaller, likely renter households making quick trips for non-essentials.
These behavioral insights empowered the retailer to adjust promotions based on the intent behind each visit, strengthen customer relationships, and drive growth.
4. Firmographic segmentation (B2B)
Firmographic segmentation is like demographic segmentation for businesses. It groups B2B audiences based on attributes such as annual revenue, location, company size, industry, and organizational structure. You can also segment by job title or decision-maker role to better target key stakeholders.
This method is great for aligning your messaging, sales strategy, or product offerings with the unique needs of various business types. A startup in the tech sector will likely respond to a very different pitch than an enterprise manufacturer, and firmographic data helps you speak to both with precision.
When to use it
Use firmographic segmentation when marketing to other businesses, especially when your product or service has different benefits depending on business size or sector.
Examples
Recently, a B2B client partnered with Experian to gain a deeper understanding of the revenue potential of their existing business customers. Using firmographic data, we segmented the client’s customers into distinct groups based on the characteristics most strongly tied to spending behavior.
For each segment, we calculated potential spend, defined as the 80th percentile of annual spend within that segment. This allowed the client to identify high-value accounts with untapped growth potential.
For example, one customer, ABC Construction, had spent $4,750. But based on their segment’s profile, their annual potential was $9,000. That insight revealed a $4,250 opportunity to deepen the relationship through more targeted marketing and sales efforts.
Best practices for market segmentation
Regardless of the segmentation method you use, the following best practices will help you maximize the benefits of your efforts.
Start with clean, reliable data
Segments are only as good as the data behind them. If your data is outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete, your segments will result in ineffective targeting and a wasted budget. Utilize accurate, compliant, up-to-date sources like Experian Marketing Data, ranked #1 in accuracy by Truthset, to ensure your targeting is on point.
Test and refine segments continuously
Business goals, market conditions, and behaviors are constantly changing. What worked last month or even last week might not work today. By adjusting your segments over time, you make sure your marketing stays relevant, focused, and effective. Use A/B testing, performance metrics, and audience analytics to iterate on your segments and improve results over time.
Align segments with personalized messaging and offers
Each segment has distinct needs, preferences, and motivations, which means generic messaging won’t resonate effectively. Once you’ve built your segments, personalize your creative, copy, and offers to appeal to each group and increase the likelihood of engagement and conversions.
Integrate segmentation across all platforms
If someone sees one message in an email and a completely different one in an ad or on your website, it creates confusion and weakens trust. From CRMs and email platforms to ad tech and analytics tools, make sure your segmentation method is applied consistently across every channel to improve performance and build a cohesive brand experience.
Segment your audiences with Experian
Effective audience segmentation is at the heart of every successful marketing strategy, but in this fragmented, privacy-conscious landscape, grouping your audience into meaningful, actionable subgroups is more challenging than ever. That’s where we come in.
With coverage of the entire U.S. population, Experian helps marketers define and categorize broad audiences into precise segments using rich data on demographics, behaviors, financial profiles, and lifestyle traits. These insights make it easier to personalize messaging, optimize media spend, and drive better outcomes.
From ready-to-use syndicated audiences to custom segments and even Contextually-Indexed Audiences that align targeting with content, Experian offers flexible segmentation solutions that perform across digital, TV, programmatic, and social channels.
In our most recent release, we introduced over 750 new and updated audience segments across key categories, including a brand-new category for Experian, giving marketers more accurate, behavior-based targeting options than ever before.
- 135+ new CPG audiences, a brand-new category for Experian, built from opt-in loyalty card and receipt scan data
- 240+ new automotive audiences covering ownership and in-market shoppers
- 100+ new high-spending behavior audiences focused on specific merchant categories
- 24 new wealth and income segments with refined household net worth tiers
- 13 new lifestyle-based housing audiences for family- and household-focused targeting
- 250+ refreshed financial segments with improved naming conventions for better discoverability and clarity
Together, these segments give marketers more accuracy to reach high-intent consumers based on real-world behaviors, spending patterns, and financial capacity.
Audience solutions powered by consumer insights
Experian Marketing Data, one of the most comprehensive and accurate consumer databases in the U.S., is the core of our segmentation capabilities. Backed by over 5,000 demographic and behavioral attributes, it helps you understand not just who your customers are but how they live, shop, spend, and engage, too.
Each audience segment is built with privacy and precision in mind, using a blend of demographic data, financial behaviors, lifestyle signals, and media habits. With these consumer insights, we’ll help you uncover meaningful patterns that lead to smarter strategy.
Experian’s pre-built audiences
Our syndicated audiences are pre-built, ready-to-activate segments based on shared characteristics from age and income to purchase behavior and lifestyle indicators. When speed and scale are a priority, these segments offer a fast, effective way to reach your target audience.
Experian’s 2,400+ syndicated audiences are available directly on over 30 leading television, social, and programmatic advertising platforms, as well as within Audigent for activation within private marketplaces (PMPs).
Here’s what’s new from our August 2025 release:
- CPG shoppers by category (e.g., Frozen Food Shoppers, Multi-Vitamin Shoppers)
- Luxury EV owners and auto brand shoppers (e.g., Rivian, Polestar, Cadillac)
- High spenders in specific categories (e.g., men’s grooming and women’s accessories)
- Ultra high-net-worth households (e.g., Net Worth $50M+) and likely home sellers
- Young Family Homeowners and Growing Family Apartment Renters
Custom audiences for specialized targeting
Need a custom audience? Reach out to our audience team, and we can help you build and activate an Experian audience on your preferred platform. Additionally, work with Experian’s network of data providers to build audiences and send to an Audigent PMP for activation.
Contextually-Indexed Audiences
Experian’s Contextually-Indexed Audiences offer a privacy-safe way to reach relevant consumers in the moments that matter without relying on identity signals or third-party cookies. These segments combine Experian’s consumer insights with page-level content signals, enabling you to align targeting with intent and mindset, even in cookieless or ID-constrained environments.
Want to take your segmentation strategy to the next level? Let’s talk. We’ll help you define your audience in ways that drive real results.
Talk to our team about your segmentation methods today
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Have you wondered how the shift toward real-time data is reshaping the way companies connect with consumers? Traditional methods of third-party data collection and demographic targeting are being replaced by more privacy-conscious approaches. In our next Ask the Expert segment, we explore how Experian and Captify’s partnership is harnessing the power of real-time onsite search data to enhance personalized advertising, address identity fragmentation, and provide valuable insights for navigating modern advertising challenges. We’re joined by industry leaders, Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer at Captify, and Chris Feo, Experian’s SVP of Sales & Partnerships. In this segment, they discuss the complexities of identity and the innovative use of real-time data in digital advertising. Watch the full Q&A below to learn more about these topics and discover how the collaborative efforts of Experian and Captify are shaping the future of personalized advertising. Understanding the power of real-time marketing data Real-time data provides an up-to-the-minute view of consumer behavior, enabling marketers to make quick, informed decisions. Captify’s use of real-time search data allows for immediate insights, contrasting with traditional third-party data, which often involves delay and prompted answers. This approach allows marketers to see trends and reactions as they unfold, making it possible to tweak campaigns and strategies and always reach the most in-market consumers. By using Captify’s real-time data, we can predict consumer interests and adapt to market changes quickly. Staying ahead of market trends with predictive analytics Captify analyzes more than a billion search signals daily, giving brands a detailed look at changes in audience behavior. These real-time insights help businesses make timely adjustments and reach their audiences in the moments that matter. Beyond digital media, Captify's multi-channel activation strategy extends to platforms such as connected TV and digital out-of-home, ensuring messages remain relevant and effective. How Experian and Captify work together Imagine being able to tailor your ads to consumers' needs and interests in real time. Our partnership with Captify enhances ad targeting and measurement by combining Experian’s vast Digital Graph with Captify’s real-time intent data. "Captify has evolved beyond relying on third-party cookies in isolation and now uses the Experian Graph to provide a more holistic view of identity at both the individual and household levels" says Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer at Captify. As privacy concerns grow, we have built and continue to invest in a signal-agnostic Digital Graph that can make connections across a wide range of identifiers, including the Experian Living Unit ID (LUID). The LUID is a unique identifier representing each household in the United States, based on real households and real people. This allows essential demographic information to be enriched to a household, enriching first-party data with detailed consumer insights, like age, gender, historical purchase behavior, and future purchase intent. By continuously adding new data and building fresh audiences and segments, we provide greater insights into the consumer base. Our Digital Graph serves as Captify’s identity spine, allowing them to connect identifiers together at both the person and household levels. This helps their clients target ads more accurately across different channels, making it easier to track and understand consumer behavior across platforms like TV, digital, and radio. Here are five key ways our partnership enhances ad targeting and measurement: Enhancing personalized advertising with real-time insights Identity fragmentation is a challenge for marketers because consumer data is scattered across different devices and platforms, making it difficult to effectively understand and target consumers. Experian and Captify’s partnership provides the fuel to help advertisers by integrating real-time search data with identity graphs, allowing for accurate targeting across various channels. By combining Experian’s robust Digital Graph with Captify’s real-time intent data, advertisers can deliver highly personalized ads on connected TV that retain their relevance and impact, no matter where the consumer engages with the content. "We ingest the Experian Graph as part of our internal Graph, allowing us to connect identifiers together at both person and household levels, which aligns with our expansion into TV, out-of-home, and audio channels."Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer, Captify Addressing identity fragmentation A fragmented identity occurs when consumer data is scattered across different devices and platforms, making it difficult to effectively understand and target consumers. Advertisers need holistic media plans instead of fragmented strategies that risk disengaging consumers, while publishers must demonstrate their platforms’ value by targeting seamlessly. By enriching and distributing thousands of demographic and behavioral segments, Experian provides the essential data needed to effectively target diverse audiences. Experian’s Digital Graph complements Captify’s data by connecting various identifiers, providing a complete view of individuals and households. This approach helps advertisers overcome fragmentation challenges, and ensure their messages reach the right audience across multiple touchpoints. Optimizing creative content dynamically Using real-time data, advertisers can adjust creative elements of their ads to better match consumer interests. This means changing parts of an ad, like images or text, based on current audience data, making it more relevant to the consumer. By partnering with Experian, Captify continues to see a rounded view of a consumer, allowing them to provide clients around the globe with data-driven creatives. These creatives achieve better results than standard ones and enable more meaningful connections with consumers. Integrating search data into connected TV Real-time search data plays a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of connected TV (CTV) advertising. Captify’s identity solution uses persistent identifiers from the Experian Digital Graph to extract value from onsite search data. Machine learning technology then categorizes these searches to understand consumer intent and create highly relevant audiences. By integrating Captify’s consumer intent data, advertisers can deliver more targeted and relevant ads on CTV platforms. This integration helps marketers reach viewers with content that resonates. Ensuring multi-channel message consistency Consistency in messaging across multiple channels is key for maintaining brand integrity and consumer trust. By using Experian's identity data, Captify ensures that advertisers can deliver cohesive messages across various platforms, including TV, digital, and radio. This integration not only enhances ad targeting precision but also solidifies the brand’s presence, ensuring that every touchpoint reinforces the same core message for a unified brand experience. Watch the full Q&A Visit our Ask the Expert content hub to watch Amelia and Chris’ full conversation. In their discussion, they cover identity beyond identifiers, personalized advertising strategies, and the evolving consumer journey. Amelia and Chris also share about interoperability challenges in CTV and how Captify is using alternative IDs like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2). Watch now Contact us About our experts Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer, Captify Amelia is Chief Product Officer at Captify, leading the Product, Engineering, Partnerships and Insight teams globally. During her three years at Captify, Amelia has delivered on her product vision to put Captify’s Search Intelligence in the hands of all advertisers—unlocking competitive advantage for clients and partners in a way that’s omnichannel, strategic, open and future-proof. She has launched Captify's Advanced TV, cookieless and data partnerships product lines. Amelia brings over a decade of experience in driving product strategy, underpinned by expertise across data science, machine learning, and analytics. She has a PhD in computational neuroscience and previous roles include product leadership at LiveRamp and Aimia. Chris Feo, SVP, Sales & Partnerships, Experian As SVP of Sales & Partnerships, Chris has over a decade of experience across identity, data, and programmatic. Chris joined Experian during the Tapad acquisition in November 2020. He joined Tapad with less than 10 employees and has been part of the executive team through both the Telenor and Experian acquisitions. He’s an active advisor, board member, and investor within the AdTech ecosystem. Outside of work, he’s a die-hard golfer, frequent traveler, and husband to his wife, two dogs, and two goats! Latest posts
When people shopped in 2023 We also saw notable shifts in how, when, and where people shopped on Black Friday. One significant trend noted in our 2023 Holiday spending report was the increasing preference for early holiday shopping, particularly online. Consumers quickly responded to early discounts and promotions, which caused a surge in spending during October. Cyber Week, encompassing Black Friday through Cyber Monday, also played a significant role, accounting for 8% of total consumer holiday spending. 2023 trends we expect to see in 2024 As you gear up for the holiday season, understanding Black Friday trends from 2023 will be vital, as Black Friday 2024 is expected to see a continuation of several key trends alongside emerging ones: Mobile shopping will continue its growth trajectory. Consumers will keep seeking early deals. Marketers will prepare promotions sooner than ever. Flexible payment arrangements like “buy now/pay later” (BNPL) will drive conversions amid continued inflation. Channel switching will become more common. Paid search will drive the most sales. Let’s talk about what past trends and future predictions mean for your marketing strategy and how you can use them to inform your 2024 holiday campaigns. Emerging consumer behaviors Consumer behaviors and preferences have been changing and reshaping the Black Friday shopping landscape over the last few years. Looking ahead to Black Friday 2024, several trends from last year are likely to continue shaping the shopping experience. Early shopping The early holiday shopping trend will continue to become more pronounced. Many consumers now begin their end-of-year shopping well before Halloween, seeking to take advantage of early deals and discounts, enjoy more time to compare prices and products, avoid crowds, secure popular items early, and spread out their budget. In 2023, Gallup found that one in four holiday shoppers even starts as early as September. This means your business must begin planning sales and promotions earlier in the season and roll them out sooner. The value of experiences We’re seeing an interesting shift toward gifting experiences over physical items among consumers with more disposable income. In a 2023 survey, one in five respondents said they’d prefer to get an experience as a gift over an item. Those in higher income brackets are allocating more of their holiday budgets to experiences that create lasting memories, such as theme park passes, art classes, concert tickets, and so forth. This trend will require retailers to get creative, potentially: Hosting giftable in-store events Enhancing the in-store experience Using experiential marketing to make deeper consumer connections Partnering with other companies to provide bundled gift/experience packages Preference for digital channels Media consumption habits and preferred engagement channels are also undergoing significant changes. Consumers increasingly turn to digital channels like streaming TV and connected TV (CTV) for entertainment and information. CTV ad spending, in particular, is expected to grow by 20% in 2024 and by low double digits into 2027. This shift will influence how retailers reach and engage with consumers, and it underscores the importance of digital marketing strategies and personalized online experiences. Mobile vs. desktop online spending The preference for mobile over desktop for online transactions is growing; in 2023, mobile devices comprised 54% of online sales, with online purchases up 10.4% from 2022 on Black Friday. More and more, consumers are using mobile devices to research, browse, and buy online. Marketers need to optimize their mobile and website experience to make the shopping experience seamless across all devices. Key products and categories Research has shown that the most popular in-store purchases of Black Friday weekend in 2023 included clothing/accessories and electronics. 82% of shoppers bought clothing in-store to inspect colors, material, and fit 73% said they would buy electronics in store to compare quality These categories were followed by: Health and beauty (49%) Household appliances (44%) Sports/leisure (32%) Interestingly, the same categories were also the top sellers online during Cyber Week 2023, with 79% of buyers seeking clothing/accessories and 66% intending to purchase electronics. Amazon was one of the most popular shopping destinations for Cyber Week 2023, with over a billion items sold. Some of the top-selling items included the Amazon Fire TV Stick and Ring Video Doorbell. This indicates a consistent consumer preference across different shopping channels and suggests shoppers are comfortable buying a wide range of products online, even during traditional in-store shopping events. Looking ahead, retailers can reasonably anticipate continued demand for clothing/accessories and electronics, both in-store and online. Marketing strategies that worked Last year was a year of growth, albeit slow growth, despite economic uncertainty. Here are some of the marketing strategies deployed that contributed to this growth. Influencer collaborations Data from a 2023 Black Friday report showed that seven of every 10 shoppers acknowledged an influencer’s role in their purchase decision. Partnering with influencers to promote Black Friday deals and hosting live streaming sessions with influencers showcasing products helped reach new audiences and build credibility. Influencers' recommendations resonated strongly with their followers, which drove traffic and increased sales. Cross-channel marketing campaigns Black Friday gives marketers a unique opportunity to engage audiences across touchpoints. Using a mix of channels, such as social media, email, websites, SMS, in-store promotions, and print media, tends to create more impactful campaigns. Last year proved to be diverse in terms of marketing channel mix. Marketers embraced a cross-channel approach to connect with their users during holiday sales, which was evident in the increased usage of channels like email, SMS/MMS, web push notifications, and emerging channels like Roku messages. Using multiple channels to promote Black Friday deals increased visibility and reached a wider audience. This comprehensive approach ensured marketing messages reached customers wherever they were. To maximize sales during the Cyber Five holiday season, activate Experian audiences as part of your omnichannel campaign. Our offerings include meticulously curated behavioral segments based on discount indicators such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Coupons/Sales. These segments help you target shoppers who are ready to take advantage of your promotions and are primed for early conversion. Our marketing data was ranked #1 in accuracy by Truthset, which means you can power smarter marketing initiatives, like insights, targeting, and measurement, using the highest-rated data. App-only deals In 2023, mobile app sales increased by 2% from 2022, generating a 12% increase in app purchases and $2 billion more in revenue than the year before. Businesses offering exclusive deals through their mobile apps incentivized customers to download and use the app for their purchases, which helped boost sales through a dedicated channel. Limited-time offers Time-limited offers are the essence of Black Friday and Cyber Week, giving shoppers a timeframe for getting the lowest prices of the year on certain products. Creating urgency is a highly effective way to get people to make a faster purchase decision. Bath & Body Works is exemplary at using limited-time offers; once a year around Black Friday, they run a “Buy 3, Get 3” sale on the whole store for a single day, which encourages customers to stock up while getting their holiday shopping done. Flash sales and hourly deals are shorter limited-time promotions that generate excitement, traffic, and sales. By highlighting specific products with steep discounts, retailers encourage customers to make instantaneous purchases. Amazon is known for these, which they refer to as Lightning Deals or product discounts available for only a few hours. Early-bird discounts and exclusive previews Retailers wanting to avoid overcrowded stores or website crashes can reward those who shop early with exclusive discounts or sneak peeks into Black Friday deals. This creates a feeling of urgency and privilege that leads to a purchase. Best Buy offers its Best Buy Plus and Best Buy Total members exclusive savings during a sale period just for them. They get early access to discounts toward the end of October, after which they open up their early bird deals to the public. Predictions for Black Friday 2024 Based on what we’ve seen in 2023, we expect the following trends to shape consumer behavior on Black Friday and beyond in 2024. Consumers will use their phones to shop more often than they already do Mobile shopping is easy and discreet, allowing customers to shop from anywhere while staying on top of sales. Black Friday mobile orders increased from 2022 to 2023, with over 50% of all Black Friday sales occurring on smartphones. This indicates a growing trust in smartphone transactions among shoppers, which is why 2024 will likely reflect this trend. As a marketer, this means you should ensure your website is optimized for smartphones and tablets. Ensure load speed is quick, navigation is simple, designs are intuitive, and mobile payment options are available. You also have an opportunity to invite your customers to sign up for SMS or push notifications so they can shop deals immediately after they’re rolled out. While mobile should be a priority, we still recommend investing in multiple channels to capture online shoppers everywhere they’re buying. Our Graph can help you unify data, capture user activity, and view your target audience holistically to optimize ad spend, allocate resources effectively, and improve ROI. Marketers will start preparing their Black Friday campaigns earlier than ever With increasing market competition and pressure to accommodate early bird deal seekers, marketers will likely start preparing their discounts, inventories, and promotional materials earlier in the summer. Data enrichment can help you prepare early Black Friday promos by providing deeper insights into your customers and what they want. Enriching your existing data with behavioral, financial, and demographic information can help you create precise audience segments and personalized content, anticipate customer preferences, optimize channel placement, and tailor your promotions effectively. On average, Experian has 250 behavioral and demographic marketing attributes per individual, which means we can decorate households and people with marketing data to get a full customer profile and fill in any gaps you have on your audience. You can also consider implementing sell-side targeting to help your promotions reach the right people. If you plan to run early promotions, try not to create deal fatigue among your consumers. Focus on building a few high-quality promotions that will attract your target customers. BNPL arrangements will become more common for conversion Given lingering inflation in the U.S., consumers will still be looking for ways to stretch their money this year, and many shoppers may seek out BNPL arrangements. With so many shoppers wanting the financial convenience of making large purchases without the immediate financial burden, marketers can use data enrichment to identify their target segments most likely to use BNPL and create personalized offers and promotions for them. Your strategy should include high-value offers and messaging that appeal to budget-conscious shoppers and a checkout optimized for BNPL options. Channel switching will surge Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are starting to become channel-agnostic, with consumers browsing online, on mobile apps, in physical stores, and on social media. As such, they expect a unified experience wherever they browse. Any inconsistency can disrupt the purchase journey and deter potential buyers. As the shopping experience becomes more connected, consumers are moving between channels more frequently, which means integrating data from various touchpoints will be crucial to understanding and predicting customer behavior. Marketers must develop cohesive omnichannel strategies with consistent messaging and promotions across channels. Your campaigns should span multiple channels so customers can engage with your brand in various ways. We work with major platforms, marketers, and agencies, which means we have existing partnerships across the ecosystem for you to connect with and bring your consumer data to life to meet your needs. Paid search will drive the most sales Research from Adobe shows paid search as the top sales driver of Cyber Week 2023, comprising nearly 30% of all online sales. Due to the high-intent customers captured by paid search and the surge in shopping on mobile devices, we expect to see paid search drive much of the Black Friday sales in 2024 — especially as advances in data analytics and AI allow marketers to optimize paid search campaigns more effectively. They can analyze vast amounts of data to refine keywords, ad copy, and bidding strategies for higher ROI and better targeting. In 2024, it's essential to prioritize paid search strategies and focus on using relevant, high-performing keywords for your campaigns. You can continuously refine your strategies using AI and data analytics to target high-intent customers. Additionally, integrating insights from customer behavior data will help you create more personalized, impactful ad copy and heighten the effectiveness of your paid search efforts. Experian can help you win Black Friday 2024 Want your marketing campaigns to stand out and reach your audiences on Black Friday this year? Partner with Experian to create data-driven, targeted, impactful 2024 holiday campaigns. Download our 2024 report here Download our 2025 report with GroundTruth here Our data empowers you to gain valuable insights and optimize your holiday marketing strategies. We can connect online and physical transactions to our Experian household ID for a holistic view of customer behavior, connect ad exposure with foot traffic, or employ control group lift analysis to measure campaign effectiveness. By activating our purchase-based holiday audiences, like last-minute and one-stop holiday shoppers, you can reach the segments most likely to spend with you. Integrating with over 150 channels, we’ll help your campaigns reach your audience wherever they are. You can even utilize our connections to various digital platforms and partners to expand your reach. With Experian’s measurement offerings, you can make data-driven decisions about your activation strategies. Engage the right audiences and drive exceptional results this holiday season with Experian. Get started Latest posts
At Experian, we power data-driven advertising through connectivity. Today, we're excited to introduce our newest offering, which helps drive that connectivity: Experian's Collaboration in clean rooms. This offering is now generally available in InfoSum, AWS Clean Rooms, and others. Experian can now facilitate successful data collaboration across multiple secure environments, such as at Experian, through crosswalks, and now in clean rooms. Whether you are a marketer or partner, introducing Experian’s signal-agnostic offline and digital identity graphs into your clean rooms lets you run identity resolution directly in the clean room. This means your data remains secure, while you and your partner experience higher match rates and you maximize your clean room investment, leading to: More resolved data More valuable insights and smarter activation More accurate and complete measurement A leap forward in data collaboration Backed by Experian’s Global Data Principles, Experian's deep roots in identity and data security offer the most effective and trusted ways to match data and protect consumer privacy. Our signal-agnostic approach means we can resolve all types of offline and digital identity signals, which is valuable now and will become even more valuable as third-party cookies go away. Additionally, data hygiene is built right into our collaboration offering, helping to improve match rates. The benefits of working with Experian’s rich identity data in a clean room environment are obvious so it is no surprise to see that 55% of data clean room users are using identity solutions in data clean rooms. What are data clean rooms? Data clean rooms are a tool typically used for data sharing, built on top of cloud providers such as AWS clean rooms. They protect data privacy while facilitating data collaboration among clients, marketers, businesses, and their partners. As the industry places greater emphasis on data security, clean rooms have emerged as secure environments that allow companies to: Enhance user privacy protection Minimize the impact of cookie deprecation Secure collaboration with data partners The industry has quickly realized that, for what clean rooms offer by way of privacy and security, they lack resolution capabilities, typically yielding subpar match rates. Benefits of Experian's Collaboration in clean rooms offering Built upon Experian’s rich offline and digital identity foundation, with support for various identifiers across platforms, Collaboration in clean rooms helps clients maximize the value of their data and meet the diverse needs of modern business. Through Experian's Collaboration in clean rooms offering, you can: Collaborate with partners for richer data insights Achieve higher match rates Improve audience building Produce more accurate and complete reports Ensure data privacy Regardless of the identifier type you are looking to collaborate on, Experian has the identity data to support you and your partner. This leads to higher match rates and more resolved data for you to use to benefit your media initiatives. Get started with Collaboration in clean rooms today Get the most out of your first-party data with Collaboration in clean rooms, which is essential for businesses that want to compete in a fast-paced market and connect with consumers in today’s data-driven world. We understand the importance of data collaboration and make seamless, secure data sharing possible between partners. Connect with us today to find out how Experian's Collaboration in clean rooms offering ensures privacy while allowing you to extract valuable data insights for smarter data-driven advertising. Start collaborating Latest posts