How do you segment customers by life stage?

1 What is life stage segmentation?

Life stage segmentation is a type of marketing segmentation that divides customers into groups based on their age, family status, income, and lifestyle. These factors affect how customers make decisions, what they value, and what they need from a product or service. For example, a young single professional may have different priorities and challenges than a married couple with children or a retired senior. Life stage segmentation helps you identify these differences and customize your marketing accordingly.

2 Why is life stage segmentation important?

Life stage segmentation is important because it helps you align your marketing with your customers' goals and pain points. By knowing what stage your customers are in, you can offer them solutions that match their needs and expectations, and avoid irrelevant or inappropriate messages that may alienate them. Life stage segmentation also helps you anticipate your customers' changing needs and preferences as they move from one stage to another, and adjust your marketing accordingly. This way, you can build long-term relationships with your customers and increase their lifetime value.

3 How to segment customers by life stage?

To segment customers by life stage, you need to collect and analyze data on their demographic and behavioral characteristics. Sources of data, such as surveys, customer feedback, purchase history, loyalty programs, social media, and web analytics can be used to gain insights. Additionally, personas, customer journey maps, and value propositions can be leveraged to understand customers' motivations and challenges. Based on the collected data, you can create segments that reflect customers' life stages such as young singles (20s-30s with no dependents and high disposable income), young families (30s-40s with one or more children and moderate to high income), mature singles (40s-50s with no dependents and high income), mature families (50s-60s with grown-up children and high income), and seniors (60+ with no dependents and low to moderate income). Each segment has its own characteristics; for example, young singles are typically adventurous, social, and interested in new experiences while seniors are usually retired, cautious, and interested in health, safety, and convenience.

4 How to use life stage segmentation in marketing?

To use life stage segmentation in marketing, you need to tailor your marketing mix to each segment, based on their needs, preferences, and behaviors. This could involve adapting product or service features, pricing, distribution, and promotion. When communicating with each segment, consider using different channels and platforms such as email, social media, blogs, podcasts, webinars or events. Additionally, you can use different tones and styles of language to appeal to each segment such as formal, casual, humorous or emotional. Different content and media can also be used to engage each segment like images, videos, testimonials, case studies or infographics. Different benefits and value propositions can be used to persuade each segment such as convenience, quality savings or social impact. And finally, incentives and offers can be used to motivate each segment like discounts, free trials loyalty programs or referrals.

5 How to measure and optimize life stage segmentation?

To measure and optimize life stage segmentation, you need to track and analyze the performance of your marketing campaigns for each segment, using metrics like reach, engagement, conversion, retention, and revenue. With this data, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy for each segment and adjust accordingly. Additionally, you can test different variations of your marketing mix for each segment to see what works best. A/B testing, surveys, or feedback forms can be used to collect and compare data. This will help you improve your effectiveness and efficiency.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?