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You are here: Home > On-line Guides > eCommerce and your business > eCommerce Business Issues > Your eCommerce Plan > Who Are Your Customers?
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Develop your own eCommerce plan
Who Are Your Customers?
 Next, try and segment your market by dividing your customer base in to distinct customer groups. This will help you to be focussed with your marketing and it will prove useful for your business web site, to position your offering and identify the keywords that your target group of customers are likely to be searching under.
Some of these segments will be more relevant to your business than others, but the objective here is to have a clear customer profile defining the attributes of your ideal prospective customer.
- Demographics: Categorising the market in terms of population characteristics, such as age, sex, income, occupation, race, family size, or religion.
- Benefit or Behavioural: Dividing the market according to how people behave, their attitudes, or the benefits they seek. For instance, in the case of financial products, one can use behavioural segmentation to distinguish needs according to a customer's position in their financial life cycle - whether the customer needs to borrow, save, invest, protect, manage cash flow, or control their tax position.
- This segment can be further subdivided between people who:Use on-line firms primarily for transactions, versus those who use them primarily for prospecting and discovering information.
- Are heavy, medium, light, or non-users of a product category.
- Business Specialisation: Categorising the market by type/ size of industry or institution. This form of segmentation applies primarily to business or institutional markets. Special programs for small business are an example of business specialisation segmentation.
- Geographic: Deciding to market in some territories but not in others, or, more likely, identifying a location that appeals to a market target. On the Internet, this issue is not as clear, because there are no geographic boundaries to limit your reach. A business can as easily reach South Africa as the next city. Hence, you need to rethink the notion of geographic segmentation, which may be culture or even language-based when applying to electronic markets.
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