Does the term “pulling a list” for an upcoming email segment give you a vague feeling of unease? Maybe it always takes longer than it should or often leads to managing disagreement or confusion about what criteria to use between multiple people.
Switching from reactively pulling lists to proactively designing segments can help focus your messaging and free up capacity for more thoughtful experiments and testing. Although these suggestions are email-focused, they apply to any kind of audience segmentation!
Public Preferences
A good place to start your segmentation is with a set of public-facing preferences. You may sometimes choose to market to everyone in your database, but a good starting point is a narrower list that someone can choose to opt out of. Assuming you’re not starting from scratch, whether you choose to add everyone to all public lists immediately or have a process for determining who goes onto what public lists is a topic for another post…
Some guidelines to start:
- If you aren’t sending content to a specific list at *least* quarterly, it’s probably not worth identifying that as a dedicated preference. Most organizations have 3-5 preferences; be cautious about adding more than this.
- Clearly communicate the purpose of the list so people know what to expect—both the type of content as well as frequency.
These lists typically form your starting point for a smaller segment. Use the group of people who have opted in (or haven’t opted out) of a specific interest/preference as the basis for creating a list. This is an out-of-the-box feature for almost all email marketing tools.
Standardize Segments
Segments are ways you internally split an audience up into multiple groups, often as a subset of contacts within a certain public list (if you use public preferences). For these to be successful, they should be:
- Driven by strategy
- Clearly defined
- Used consistently
- Readily accessible
Getting into a little bit more detail on each of these:
Strategy first
Ensure that segments tie into an overall strategy. This will head off discussions about whether or not a segment is worth creating, or why it might matter. The strategy should work toward a specific goal and create guidelines that help determine how a target audience could be defined. For example, a strategic segment might be a list of customers who have purchased X but not Y because there is a good opportunity for cross-selling. On the other hand, a list of customers who make a purchase every six months doesn’t have any value unless there’s a plan for how to translate that information into a message that’s relevant and works toward your goals.
Shared definitions
You might find that different stakeholders have a slightly different understanding of a certain term which has created confusion in the past when different reports didn’t line up. Documenting what a certain term means to *your* organization heads off confusion down the road.
Use a business glossary to ensure everyone has a shared understanding of what each segment is used for and how it’s created. The glossary should include both the business context and technical definition to ensure stakeholders from all aspects of the organization are clear on how it intersects with their role.
Regular use
Commit to re-using segments. Consistency is the foundation of a good marketing plan; if you need to re-envision your audience for each send that’s a sign of inconsistency. There’s a time and a place for experimentation, but you’ll receive the most benefit from your experiments with a stable baseline for comparison.
Easy access
Make sure the segments you use regularly are easy to find and use. Depending on your technology setup, you might need to change how you store data. This could mean adding automation or rollups to your CRM, syncing that data to a marketing automation tool, and then pre-building lists with the appropriate filters. This might be more upfront work, but it will be a timesaver in the long run.
Experiment deliberately
The prep you’ve done to pre-define standard segments will free up time for higher-impact work. One place that energy could go is into better content. Another place is into thoughtful experimentation.
Test small audience segments that require more effort to create and trial new techniques. Compare the results to your standard, baseline segments to understand how well they work. Be mindful of your overall capacity and ability to create messaging for these small groups in the future, but if they perform well, consider incorporating these changes into your regular work.
