Identify customer segments

Customer segmentation helps you categorize your audience based on shared characteristics, making personalizing communication and marketing efforts easier. Typically, marketing teams work with the following segments:

• Persona – A fictional representation of an ideal customer based on research and accurate data. Personas capture traits like demographics, behavior, goals, and pain points to help you effectively understand and engage with different types of users.
• Contact group – A dynamic or static collection of actual contacts groups based on specific criteria, such as purchase history, engagement level, interests, or preferences. Unlike personas, contact groups consist of real people, allowing for targeted campaigns and personalized messaging.
• Lead – A potential customer who has shown interest in your business but hasn’t made a purchase or taken a key action yet. You can collect leads through website sign-ups , inquiries, or interactions with marketing campaigns. The goal is to nurture leads and convert them into customers.

Businesses use personas, contact groups, or leads to refine their strategies to ensure that the right audience gets the right message at the right time. Let’s use “segments” or “customer segments” to refer to any segmentation types in this guide.

Align customer journeys with the right segments

A well-defined customer journey is only as good as the customers that live in it. If the customer journey for your segment is too broad, misaligned, or contradictory, your journey may not accurately reflect real customer experiences.

You might be then reaching incorrect conclusions, and the marketing decisions you make based on your incorrectly defined journey might lead to:

• Misaligned messaging – Tailored content and crafted interactions don’t resonate with the right audience.
• Ineffective touchpoints – Key customer interactions through your digital channels fail to address actual pain points.
• Missed opportunities – Overlooking critical moments where customers need guidance, reassurance, or incentives to move forward.

For example, if your business serves enterprise buyers and small business owners, their journeys will likely differ significantly.

Enterprise buyers usually have a longer decision-making process. They require detailed comparisons, approvals from different stakeholders, and ROI justifications.

In contrast, smaller businesses may prioritize affordability, quick implementation, and immediate results. Putting both segments on a single journey can result in a confusing or ineffective experience.

Use segments to shape effective customer journeys

To ensure your customer journey provides meaningful and actionable insights, consider the following steps when mapping customer segments on different customer journey touchpoints.

Validate your decisions with data. When you place a segment on a customer journey, make sure it reflects actual behavior or attributes backed by analytics – such as engagement patterns, conversion history, or demographics – so that each touchpoint remains relevant and impactful.

Start with customer journeys even if you don’t have any contact groups yet

If you’re just getting started with segmentation, you don’t need to wait for a fully developed persona library to begin.

• If you haven’t created your customer persona or any other segment and mapped it to your content, use real data from website analytics, CRM data, customer surveys and research, and sales feedback to define specific segments.
• Group customers based on meaningful characteristics, such as business size, decision-making roles, or behavior patterns.
• Validate your groups with the sales and Customer Success teams to ensure personas reflect real customer interactions.

Starting with real data and team insights ensures your segments are grounded in reality and ready to support meaningful, personalized customer journeys.

Consider mapping touchpoints for each segment separately

You don’t need to wait until every persona or segment is perfectly defined before you start mapping customer journeys – starting small can still deliver valuable insights.

• Each customer might interact with your brand differently. Even though they start their journey on the same website page, a technical buyer may visit documentation pages, while a marketing director may read case studies.
• Identify content (and actions) that different personas will consume across your channels. If you have never used customer segments in mapping interactions, start with one customer journey for the clearest defined segment.
• Don’t force conflicting segments into a single customer journey. The insights produced with such a journey may not be actionable or at least misleading.

By focusing on one well-understood segment at a time, you’ll build more accurate journeys and avoid the confusion that comes from blending conflicting behaviors into a single path.

Iterate and refine segments your customer journeys

Using well-researched personas and meaningful contact groups in customer journey mapping ensures that each journey touchpoint reflects real audience needs.

If your personas are poorly defined or contradict each other, contact groups overlap, or leads don’t have a clear position in your sales funnel, actions based on this customer journey may lead to wasted resources and missed opportunities. Refine content and interactions to smoothen drop-offs between neighboring customer journey stages.

Track engagement (e.g., bounce rates, conversion rates) to see if the touchpoints resonate with the intended audience. The more accurately your customer segments represent your actual customers, the more data inform the journey stages, the more valuable and actionable your journey insights will be.

Next step

You have learned how knowing customer segments helps you build effective customer journeys. Find out about how understanding your analytics data will help you in defining stages for your customer journey.