A market segment is a subgroup of people or organizations that have one or more characteristics in common that cause them to have the same product needs.
Customers are often grouped under the following categories:
Demographic – basic personal information, including age, gender, income and education.
Geographic – specific areas where customers or businesses are located, broken down international region right down to a rural area.
Behavioral – How customers are using your products and what type of user they are. It can also include customer transactional behavior, such as browsing, spend by category, sentiment and price points.
Lifestyle – Customer habits and pastimes, including sports, hobbies, fashion and holiday preferences.
Psychographic/Attitudinal – Including social status, perception of the world, values and lifestyle.
Preference – This can cover communication preference opt-ins, as well as which of your channels (such as online, through an app or in-store) they prefer and the time/day they are most responsive to your messages.
Loyalty – For companies with loyalty programs, this can include customer activity and points earned/redeemed. Alternatively, it can be a recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) score.
Value – The current value and future value (or lifetime value) in term of revenue or profitability of an individual customer.