Post-click segmentation and the MECE principle
Scott Brinker on Tuesday, December 2, 2008 at 03:47PM One of the major advantages of conversion paths is the ability to easily — and transparently — segment respondents. By giving respondents a few simple, one-click choices on the first page or two of their landing experience, you can simultaneously navigate them to the most relevant content and offers while revealing their segment. This is the win-win objective of post-click segmentation.
Executed properly, post-click segmentation reveals people’s preferences, intentions, and audience segments.
Executed poorly, however, post-click segmentation can be both annoying to the respondent and useless to the marketer.
So how do you segment properly?
An important part of proper execution is making segmentation choices mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. This is known as the MECE principle, which was popularized in management consulting by McKinsey.
The MECE principle is pretty straightforward: out of a set of options, (a) a specific choice will cleanly fit into one and only one of them (i.e., the options are “mutually exclusive”) and (b) there will be no situations where no option is applicable (i.e., the options are “collectively exhaustive”). There is no overlap between options, and there are no gaps without an option.
You can visualize it like this. Choices that are not mutually exclusive:
Choices that are mutually exclusive:
Put in terms of post-click segmentation, when a set of one-click segmentation choices is presented to respondents, every respondent will have one and only one choice that clearly applies to them.
What you don’t want is for a respondent to be stuck on a page with either of these confused thoughts:
- Two or more of these choices apply to me, which should I choose? What if I want several, or all?
- None of these choices apply to me, what should I do?
When respondents get stuck like that, they experience a frustration that tarnishes your brand. They either abandon or make a random, haphazard choice — which is not good for them or you.
A good example of a proper MECE segmentation would be this landing page for Citrix, for people responding to HIPPA-compliant IT advertisements in the health care industry:
There are actually three choices here that a respondent can click on:
- Strategies for large hospitals.
- Strategies for small hospitals.
- I’m not with a hospital.
This should be a quick and obvious choice for most respondents. For the target audience — hospital IT administrators — it promises to give them the content that is most relevant to their situation. For Citrix, it reveals which ads are pulling large vs. small audiences and how well they’re doing at converting each respectively.
If someone is not with a hospital, they have an “escape hatch” choice. Why bother with an escape hatch at all? If people land who aren’t the audience you’re looking for, why not just let them abandon?
One reason you want to provide an escape hatch is in case you made a mistake and failed to provide a choice that is important. In this example, Citrix might discover that IT consultancies are also interested in their solutions on behalf of hospitals of various sizes. The escape hatch probably won’t convert very well, but by looking at the people who do convert on that branch of the path, you can uncover unaddressed audiences that should have their own top-level choice.
Another reason to provide an escape hatch is that you want to disambiguate between respondents who didn’t fit into a segment you care about vs. respondents who may have been in a valuable segment, but bounced on your landing page for some other reason. You will always have some bounce rate on your landing page, where you can’t get any post-click segmentation information at all, but you want to minimize that as much as possible. Knowing is better than not knowing.
A not-so-good example of segmentation — one that isn’t MECE — is a landing page for, say, an enterprise software solution that gives respondents these two choices:
- Do you want to download the white paper?
- Or do you want to sign-up for the webinar?
From a respondent’s perspective, this can be a stuck moment because their reaction might be “I don’t know”, “it depends”, or “both”. They have to hesitate to think about this, and whichever choice they do make, they may wonder about the road not taken.
From a marketer’s perspective, this isn’t very useful either, since “people who like white papers” and “people who like webinars” as segments don’t reveal much insight into your audience.
The white paper vs. webinar choice might be a good one at some point in a conversion path — especially if it’s offered with a third choice to get both — as it lets people indicate their preference for content format (which is useful to a marketer for knowing what type of content to produce more of). But I would argue that it’s not really a segmentation choice in the sense of defining an addressable customer niche.
More thoughts on segmentation strategies to follow shortly, but the MECE principle is a good foundation to start with.
Landing Pages, Segmentation, post-click marketing in Strategy 
Reader Comments (5)
There's a fine line between post-click segmentation being useful and irritating, The number of options should be kept to a minimum IMO
You are right in that it needs to be useful, and if it is useful it will never be irritating. First and foremost, segmentation always needs to be designed to be useful for the user who is responding. If it's useful, then anywhere from 1-3 segmentation forks can be very successful. We test everything, so there's no "shoulds", only what actually works.
1. Strategies for large hospitals.
2. Strategies for small hospitals.
3. I’m not with a hospital.
There is a 4th option.
"Our hospital has 300 employees. Is that large of small?" I think a slight improvement to this page, would be adding something quantitative around "large" and "small" (whether that be in terms of patients, employees, revenue or whatever). Obviously, this should be done in a succinct and clear way to not take away from the simplicity of the landing page.
Other than that, good post. I really enjoy reading your blog. Lots of insightful stuff.
Nate
This conversation is so interesting...
For my point, ION introduced me to this topic, and I am working on testing it on more client assignments.
On this same point, I have a client that implemented their own "conversion path." I was very curious to see what the bounce rate was for this page... I looked into their analytics data and was excited to discover their bounce rate was "extremely low." Almost every visitor took action on this page, and adding this page to the funnel process cost them almost nothing. Their conversion path is not "MECE" compliant, but it's a good start, and the MECE conversation could help them improve that tool.
Very interesting!
Cheers to ION for this conversation.
[Guy
DroidINDUSTRIES.com
Thanks for this, Scott—a validating framework for crafting segmentations. What would give me some closure on the "how to segment" question is: in what voice should a segmentation choice be presented? Is there data on the efficacy of the 'landing experience's voice' vs. the respondent's voice? Pardon me if this is addressed elsewhere... if so, show me the way!