Targeting your audiences and segmenting your lists are ways of working intelligently with the data you have on hand to find answers to the fundamental questions that will help you optimize your relationship with subscribers and your return on investment:

• Who are your best customers?
• What appeals to them?
• What are their pain points in relation to what you offer?

These are some categories of data and information you can tap into to determine your target audiences:

• Basic demographic information like age, gender and geography is the absolute minimum marketers should target and one of the quickest, easiest ways to start.
• Customer lifecycle uses sales demographics to determine where your customers are in the purchase lifecycle so you can target them when they’re ready to make their next buy.
• Customer activity utilizes email click data. Identifying which links subscribers click on will tell you their interests and how to target them next.
• Website analytics provides actionable data such as what product category or page the subscriber last abandoned or purchased from.

Segmentation for email relevance is the process of taking your larger email list and separating it into the target audiences you’ve identified, then creating highly-focused messages appropriate to each segment. According to MarketingSherpa, segmented campaigns produce at least 30% more opens and 50% higher click-through rates than undifferentiated messaging.

Here are some strategies to consider for grouping target audiences into meaningful segments, and why they’re important:

• Surveys: Reviewing survey responses helps you learn the different interests of your subscribers so you can target your offers related to certain types of products or services.
• Past purchase data: Look at recency, frequency and monetary value: recent customers are most likely to respond to cross-sell messages; frequent purchasers tend to be responsive to upsell messages.
• Average purchase price enables you to focus on your core revenue generators and incent lower-level purchasers.
• VIPs: Knowing who they are enables you to acknowledge major customers with exclusive information, content and deals.
• Audience origin tells you how subscribers got on your email list in the first place. Each segment is likely to respond differently to your messages.

Remember: the better your targeting and segmentation, the better your results.

About the Author:

Deb Papp

Deb Papp is Marketing Communications Manager at Lyris. She develops content for lead generation programs and resources, company messaging, event and promotional collateral, and the Lyris website.