The first order of business in developing a meaningful segmentation strategy is to set clear goals and have sufficient information about who is visiting your site and most important, a long-term view that goes beyond a simple snapshot of site visitors at a moment in time.

Defining the goals is pretty straightforward. You tailor your web site content to meet the wants, needs and preferences of your web site customers. If you've done your homework correctly, you'll enhance customer satisfaction, increase conversion and build customer relationships and loyalty.

To tailor the content of your site effectively you need to be able to get inside the hearts and minds of your web site visitors to understand their wants, needs and preferences. Sometimes this is quite easy: You're a car rental company and you know that consumers in different cities have different needs. Renters wanting to pick up a car in Vail Colorado probably want four-wheel drive SUV. Renters in Miami want convertibles. Or you are Orbitz and you have a millions of data points highlighting what customer's have purchased in the past and what other people have purchased, so you have some history to build on.

If this information is not readily available, how ...