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Utilizing Audience Segmentation to Personalize Your Email Content

Loyal fans, followers, and customers are the building blocks for any brand — without them, nothing we do would be possible. They’ve extended their support, time, and money to help us grow, and each and every one is important to the success of our brand. But according to a survey from Marketo, 63% of respondents were fed up with being blasted with repeated generic emails from companies. So how can we continue to ensure that each customer feels special, even as our brand continues to grow? The solution, Marketo says, is to make content more personalized and relevant based on consumer behavior across other channels and interactions. One can do this using Customer relationship management (CRM) tools and Audience Segmentation to cultivate specialized outreach initiatives for different subsets of your audience. I know, it sounds intense. But once you get into it, the concept is really quite simple: give your audience what they want!

The Rundown on Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is breaking customers down into groups to cater to their needs more effectively. There are a few ways we can categorize them:

• By demographic. Age, gender, geographical locations, etc.

• By preferences. Method and frequency of communication.

• By actions. Have they put items in their cart but didn’t follow through on the purchase? Have they subscribed to emails?

• By purchases. What purchases have they made? Any repeat purchases? How recently?

• By customer status. Are they a new or repeat customer?

You can use any combination of these to craft unique messages that will appeal to customers more effectively than if you simply sent out the same generic email to everyone on your mailing list. It shows that you are making attempts to address them as an individual by sending content that is tailored to their specific needs and wants.

How to Start

You should begin by imagining what your ideal customer looks like. Once you have a clear picture of who you’d like your audience to be, you can begin making decisions about how to contact them. Your CRM tool will manage each individuals profile. It will also allow you to segment your audience using multiple attributes and actions, so you can create well-rounded content.

Where it can take you…

Email segmentation allows you to run A/B testing by sending variations of the same message to different groups on your mailing list and seeing which one gets the greatest response. Once you figure out why a particular message was more successful than others, you can harness that data to gain greater traction with your audience. As you continue to further refine your content, the happier and more understood your audience will feel.