The data segmentation challenge for beverage brands
We’ll assume that you’ve read the previous article about data collection. If you haven’t, we suggest you read this article about the challenges you may face first. If you haven’t read it yet, please click here for data collection here for data application, and here for data monetization.
In today's crowded beverage market, customer loyalty, and data-driven marketing are king. A crucial aspect of this strategy is data segmentation, the process of dividing consumers into distinct groups based on shared characteristics. For beverage brands, however, achieving effective segmentation presents unique challenges.
In this article, WisePass will share its take on the challenges segmentation can pose through 3 different questions.
Which metrics do you use to segment the data?
Challenges beverage brands may face
It’s one thing to collect a list of emails or phone numbers, it’s another to categorize the data and turn them into insights.
The first challenge is to connect the initial user data with some additional data points. These additional data points could be transactions, events attended, or trials.
The second challenge is to make sense of the interactions between the brands and the consumer. How many times has the user interacted with the brand activities? What were the activities and how engaged the user is?
From such segmentation, it’s much more effective later to decide who to send a message to for the next marketing activity.
For brands, the main challenge is to categorize the user data effectively so it can be used properly for marketing purposes.
What we do at WisePass
At WisePass, we’ve divided the marketing activities into 4. Awareness, Engagement, Promotion, and Loyalty.
An awareness campaign for WisePass is when users try the product in a venue. For beverage brands, they may call these venues, on-trade premises or HORECA. It will typically be a bar, restaurant, hotel or club. In other words, these are venues where users can spend and enjoy the product.
The second type of segmentation is to differentiate the first-time interaction consumer versus a repeat interaction. That could be for a specific activity or overall. That will help measure the consumer base's engagement level and see how attractive the offer is to the market. The more new consumers (first-time interactions ) the more interesting it is for beverage brands.
To make it short, WisePass already segmented the data for beverage brands to run their campaigns and focus on the marketing impact.
How do you approach segmentation?
Challenges beverage brands may face
Typically we see from the beverage brand’s side a series of branding activities executed without any connection data-wise.
When a trial campaign is being run, it’s hard for the brand to collect the user data and re-engage that user specifically because there’s usually no system implemented in on-trade premises for the brand to work with.
The challenge is to reach a fair amount of users let them try the product and re-engage them later with some activations across the city. That’s hard to execute at scale.
In other words, the main challenge is to run a series of trials and re-use the data properly to engage these users with another series of activations at scale.
What we do at WisePass
We’re able to run some events at WisePass and filter the users who tried the item from a beverage brand and reach them to see if they’re interested in joining. If they do join, we’re able to collect the data as they’ll be scanning to join the event.
We can also see the difference between the users who never tried the items with the users who already tried to track the engagement level later on. The usual approach we have is to segment first-time interactions versus repeat interactions to build a significant user base.
When the first-time interaction users are large enough, focusing on repeat interactions is key and requires some set of actions from the beverage brands so you can get some users to join some activations later on. Typically, we would incentivize users by letting them know they can join an event if they tried the items at least 10 times via the WisePass app.
To sum it up, WisePasscan run several trial campaigns and link to the users with other campaigns like activations or promotions.
How do you segment the data to reach, engage, or promote at scale?
Challenges that beverage brands may face
Some beverage brands may allocate some budget to drive consumers to buy in on-trade premises. The problem is how they can measure the impact in real-time across multiple outlets in multiple cities.
As usual, there’s no data feedback in every outlet for the beverage brand. On top of that, the main challenge is to reach the users and let them know about the promotion for them to go to enjoy it.
Beverage brands might usually just set up a big logo in the bar or somewhere visible enough. That’s it. Sometimes, the brand can do some trade marketing and provide more free products if some sales KPI are reached.
In other words, reaching the right audience with the right message and measuring the impact promptly is the main challenge.
What we do at WisePass
At WisePass, we can segment the data accordingly to reach the users who already tried the items from the brand and create an item where users will start spending at the venue. We call this a promotion campaign.
When the user base of the beverage brand is big enough, this is when a promotion campaign can be launched and drive many users to eligible venues to enjoy such promotions. A typical example would be a buy 1 get 1 free. That promotion can be tied to a challenge to incentivize the users with some rewards to increase the effectiveness of the campaign.
In other words, WisePass can reach the right audience to send the right message to your users to drive traffic and sales in some on-trade premises.
