Customer/user segmentation has been a critical element of marketing and is one of the most important strategic concepts brought by the marketing discipline to companies[14]. User segmentation is the process of developing effective schemes to classify and organize significant groups of customers. A user segment is a group of prospects or customers selected from a database based on the characteristics they possess or exhibit. It also allows the company to differentially treat consumers in different segments. User profiling is the process of analyzing customers in each segment in order to generalize, describe or name this set of customers based on common characteristics. It is the process of understanding and labeling a set of users. It provides valuable information about users/customers so that marketers can provide stronger and more targeted offers and each user segment constitutes the target group of users. One-to-one marketing is the ideal marketing strategy, where each marketing campaign or product is optimally targeted for each individual customer; but this is not always possible. Therefore, segmentation is necessary to distinguish similar users and gather them into one segment. Without a doubt, using segmentation to understand user needs is much simpler, faster and cheaper than investing solely in understanding them in a particular way[9]. With proper market segmentation, businesses can organize the right products, services and resources for each target user cluster and build a close relationship with them. As a result, market segmentation has been regarded as one of the most critical elements in achieving successful modern marketing and customer relationship management. The clickstream data is a sequence of Uniform R...... middle of paper ....... Biol. Bioinformation. Vol.1,pp: 24–45, 2004[12] Punj, G. and Stewart, D.W., Cluster Analysis in Marketing Research: Review and Suggestions for Application, Journal of Marketing Research, vol. 20, pp: 134–148, 1983[13] Sandro Araya, Mariano Silva, Richard Weber, A methodology for extracting web usage and its application to the identification of target groups, Fuzzy Sets and Systems, pp: 139–152,2004.[14 ] Shina HW, Sohnb SY, “Segmenting Stock Trading Customers by Potential Value,” Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 27, pp; 27–33, 2004[15] Srivastava, J., Cooley R., Deshpande, M., Tan, P.N., Web Usage Mining: Discovery and Applications of Usage Patterns from Web Data. SIGKDD Explorations, vol. 1, no. 2, pp:12-23, 2000.[16] Tsai CY, Chiu CC, A purchase-based market segmentation methodology. Expert System Appl., vol.27, pp:265-276, 2004.
tags