The Power of Audience Segmentation

How can your association get more personal with your audience and send them what they need? Audience segmentation is the key for additional revenue, broader engagement, and new audience segments.

Good marketing delivers relevant content. Great marketing delivers personalized, timely content to the right people. So how can we get more personal with our audience and send them what they need? Audience segmentation is the key.

Did you know 77 percent of email marketing ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns? Still, 42 percent of marketers don’t segment and only four percent segment with multiple data types.

Start with the end in mind: who are the different types of people you’re communicating with, and what specific actions do you want them to take? Sending a monthly customer newsletter with industry updates is different from an email campaign for an upcoming event, or even an onboarding campaign for new members or certification course. Choose your goal, assess the action needed, and tailor the content accordingly.

Research shows if you segment an email campaign by interest group, then you can see up to 10 percent higher open rates. Take it one step further: use your audience data to segment by geographic location for promotions and events. One company increased its open rate for regional conference promotions from 22 to 66 percent.

Keep the following opportunities in mind when segmenting your audience for upcoming campaigns:

• Additional Revenue. The American Association of Airport Executives (AAAE) created a nurture campaign for its annual conference by setting up target groups based on the journey it wanted certain audience segments to take along the way to registering for the event (think actions like general information, justification letters, purchase reminders, and a mute option). By segmenting and assigning specific actions to different emails in the campaign, AAAE saw an additional $73,000 in registrations for the event.
• Broader Engagement. The Florida Association of Insurance Agents (FAIA) built out an automated membership marketing strategy that included four different campaigns covering everything from new members to renewals. Since launching, FAIA has seen a 201 percent increase in email engagement.
• New Audience Segments. The Texas Medical Association (TMA) analyzed its member campaign data and noticed many non-members were opening a member newsletter and purchasing TMA courses and course materials. These people were buying from TMA but not hearing from them again, because they weren’t in the system for these communications. Now TMA has a new audience segment to address.