Marketing teams are drowning in data but starving for insights. You’ve got millions of customer interactions flowing through your systems, but finding the valuable segments buried in that data? That takes weeks of manual analysis — and by the time you’re done, oftentimes the opportunity has already passed.
There’s a better way.
The Problem: Valuable Segments Are Hiding in Plain Sight
Every marketer knows the basics. Gender, location, customer lifetime value — these are the low-hanging fruit. You segment by these attributes, see a 20% improvement, and call it a win.
But what happens when you’ve already picked all the low-hanging fruit?
The Diminishing Returns Trap
Without new inspiration, you target the same segments repeatedly. Your audiences get disengaged, your campaign effectiveness declines, and your engagement and conversion rates suffer. The segments that drove results six months ago barely move the needle today.
The real problem isn’t that there aren’t more valuable segments — it’s that you don’t know what you don’t know. Hidden subsegments exist within your broader audiences, and valuable customer combinations remain undiscovered. Revenue opportunities go untapped simply because you never thought to look for them.
Why Manual Segmentation Fails at Scale
Here’s the reality: analyzing millions of customer attributes manually takes weeks. You’re juggling activity levels, shipping preferences, viewing history, style preferences, loyalty status, site recency, CLV, revenue per visitor, CTR, and paid traffic percentages. You need to find meaningful patterns across thousands of possible combinations.
And when you finally find something promising? That moment is gone. Shoppers have moved on, and they’re shopping for something else now.
Traditional segmentation requires you to start with a hypothesis, then build the segment. But what if your hypothesis is wrong? What if the real opportunity is in a combination of attributes you never thought to test?
The Solution: AutoSegments Uncovers What Manual Analysis Misses
AutoSegments is Bloomreach’s AI-powered segment discovery capability. It automatically identifies high-value customer segments by analyzing millions of attribute combinations, transforming weeks of manual analysis into minutes of actionable insight.
How AutoSegments Works
The process is straightforward:
- Define your inputs: Select the customer properties and target metrics that matter to your business
- Let AI analyze: Loomi AI examines millions of attribute combinations to find patterns
- See the results: Results are organized in intuitive charts showing relationships between metrics
- Activate instantly: Plug actionable audiences directly into your campaigns
AutoSegments doesn’t just tell you who to target — it reveals why they have potential. This enables more strategic messaging and opens new conversations with your customers.
Real Results: How a UK Entertainment Retailer Unlocked Hidden Revenue
A UK-based ecommerce retailer selling films and physical media faced a challenge common to many businesses: a complex data landscape with too many variables to analyze manually.
Its catalog is split into two categories: High Definition (Blu-ray and 4K UHD) with higher margins and better long-term customer stickiness, and Low Definition (DVD) with lower margins. The strategic goal was clear — migrate LD customers to HD purchases — but the traditional HD segment was tuning out.
A new approach was needed.
The Implementation
The retailer used AutoSegments to analyze:
- Customer properties: Activity level, shipping fee preferences, item views, style preferences, loyalty status, and days since last visit
- Key metrics: Customer lifetime value, revenue per visitor, click-through rate, and paid traffic percentage
Within minutes, AutoSegments identified thousands of segment combinations and organized them into easy-to-read charts. What would have taken weeks of manual analysis happened in a few clicks.
This led to three game-changing use cases that drove measurable business impact.
How AutoSegments Drives Revenue
Use Case #1: Turning Audience Insights Into PPC Performance
AutoSegments identified an underutilized high-value segment: active users with low or no shipping spend and no loyalty status who had visited within 90 days. The insight? This extremely valuable segment was under-indexing for PPC traffic.
The action: The retailer passed this segment as an audience signal to their Performance Max campaigns and increased the budget by 25%.
The results:
- CTR increased from 1.8% to 1.9% — despite the budget increase
- Conversion rate jumped from 1.81% to 1.93%
Typically, budget increases lead to a performance decrease as you reach less-qualified audiences. The AutoSegments audience signal overcame this, delivering more efficient ad spend and higher conversion rates at scale.
Use Case #2: Discovering Hidden Affiliate Opportunities
When AutoSegments analyzed the retailer’s referral program data, it identified an outlier: high referral reward earners with moderate per-customer revenue.
Digging deeper, the retailer pulled this segment into a detailed report and discovered two vinyl influencers already driving value organically. These customers were actively referring others but weren’t part of the formal affiliate program.
The impact: The retailer now has a targeted recruitment strategy for its affiliate network, transforming referral data into a pipeline of proven influencers with engaged audiences.
Use Case #3: Cross-Selling High Definition Products to Low Definition Customers
This use case is where AutoSegments truly showed its power.
The retailer assumed LD and HD customers were distinct groups — LD loyalists who preferred DVDs weren’t interested in premium formats. AutoSegments challenged that assumption.
The AI discovered a segment of active, engaged LD customers who had never purchased HD, but showed strong interest in specific content categories that were mostly available in HD format. On the surface, they appeared to be LD loyalists. AutoSegments revealed they were content-driven shoppers constrained by format availability.
The test: During a payday offers email campaign originally targeting HD customers, the retailer showed an HD deal (two 4K films for $30) to the LD AutoSegment instead.
The results:
- LD AutoSegment CTR: 1.59%
- All LD customers CTR: 1.36%
- Increase vs. global average: 34% (global average: 1.18%)
- The HD offer became a top 10 clicked URL for the LD segment
- HD customers (the original target) showed lower engagement
AutoSegments discovered 500+ potential segments in total, validating the cross-sell hypothesis with data and opening a new revenue stream from the existing LD customer base — with higher margins and better long-term stickiness.
What Makes AutoSegments Different
AutoSegments is the only solution in the marketing automation space that automatically generates a range of segments from given inputs. Competitors, meanwhile, only offer prediction-based segments or chatbot segment builders.
Built on Real-Time First-Party Data
AutoSegments works because it’s built on Bloomreach’s first-party data foundation:
- Real-time data ingestion captures every customer interaction
- Profile unification creates a complete customer view
- ID resolution connects cross-channel behavior
- Rich customer properties and metrics feed the AI continuously
Instant Omnichannel Deployment
Once you’ve discovered a valuable segment, you can use it immediately across email, SMS, web, and app — no need for technical setup or special catalog requirements. The visual interface is accessible to non-technical marketers, and the best-in-class marketing automation platform handles execution.
Continuous Discovery
AutoSegments doesn’t just find segments once — it continuously discovers new opportunities as your customer data evolves. Each segment comes with insights that act like a manual for activation, helping you understand not just who to target but also how to message them effectively.
From Information to Action to Impact
AutoSegments transformed this UK retailer’s approach to customer segmentation, generating the equivalent of weeks of manual analysis in minutes thanks to AI-powered insight.
By uncovering high-value segments across PPC, referrals, and email campaigns — and revealing 500+ actionable opportunities — the platform didn’t just save time: It unlocked new revenue streams and validated strategic hypotheses with hard data.
But perhaps most importantly, AutoSegments revealed the “why” behind customer potential, not just the “who.” By identifying that LD customers showed strong interest in specific content categories primarily available in HD, the retailer could engage in more relevant conversations with its audience.
This is the promise of owned AI functionality: finding opportunities that don’t just optimize existing campaigns, but open entirely new strategic pathways.
For marketing teams drowning in data but starving for insights, AutoSegments offers a clear path from information to action — and from action to meaningful business impact.
Ready to discover what’s hiding in your data? Explore AutoSegments to see how AI-powered segment discovery can transform your marketing strategy.
