Classification is something people do every day, whether they realize it or not. If you’re like me, then when you collect your mail, you take a minute to sort the mail into several categories. Bills go in one pile. Junk mail into another and sometimes, I’ll even have a third pile for personal letters. We can do this because we’ve learned to recognize types of mail based on its packaging. Sorting envelopes is really simple though; there are only a few attributes you can look for.

With customers, there are way too many variables for a person to digest. Some of these variables may be really important, and others may be useless. This is where classifiers come in...

What is a classifier?

A classifier is something that predicts which group an object belongs to based on the object’s characteristics. It uses trained data so the different categories are all known. In our previous post, we talked about cluster analysis, which identifies different groups of data based on information we are receiving. Classification allows us to place those clusters into specific groups.

Why this is important for marketing:

When you’re thinking about the different personas you are targeting, you can use classification techniques to categorize each cluster into the personas you have. Each customer is more like one persona than another, so you can classify each point into these known variables. This is key to putting the right products in front of the right people or even the right content in front of the right persona.It allows you to target your efforts more specifically and provide a more personalized experience to your visitors.