Delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right person requires precise audience targeting. It’s a blend of art and science, where marketers need both the creativity of crafting personalized messages and the precision of data-driven segmentation to drive maximum impact. In this short read, we’ll explore the types and techniques that can help you effectively identify key customer segments to create ultra-targeted email campaigns.

What Types of Audience Segmentation Are There?

If you’re relatively new to email segmentation, it might be helpful to understand the wide array of segmentation options out there. Most of us are familiar with demographic segmentation such as age, gender, and occupation, but there are more you should consider (the list below is by no means exhaustive!).

• Psychographic: Segment based on lifestyle, values, interests, and personality traits. Understanding these aspects can help you create more emotionally resonant and engaging content.
• Geographic: Tailor your emails based on the geographic location of your subscribers. This can be particularly useful for region-specific promotions or events.
• Behavioral: This can include information like past interactions with emails, website visits, and engagement history. By analyzing how customers interact with your content, you can tailor your messages to better meet their needs and preferences.
• Engagement: Identify active or recently lapsed subscribers. This helps you to prioritize your efforts and target the right segments with the most relevant content.
• Customer Lifecycle Stage: Identify where your customers are in their journey with your brand, such as newly subscribed or a loyal advocate. This allows you to send targeted messages that are relevant to their current stage.
• Customer Value: Focus on the value of each customer brings to your business, such as high-value customers, frequent buyers, or those with high potential. This helps prioritize your marketing efforts and resources. 
• Content Consumption: Segment based on the type of content consumed such as articles, videos, podcasts, and their frequency of consumption. Also, you can segment on preferred reading formats such as print, digital, or audio.
• Genre Preferences: Identify readers who follow specific authors, or segment based on favorite music genres, such as rock music, to promote events like book signings or music festivals.
• Transactional: Look at purchase history, average order value, and frequency of purchases. These insights help you understand your customer’s buying behaviors and identify patterns that can inform your marketing strategies.

Having a multi-layered segmentation approach means using your rich data points (that might otherwise go unused) and when they are effectively combined, helps you create highly personalized, conversion-driven email campaigns.

Techniques on How to Segment Your Audience

Having siloed data can make segmentation challenging. One of the great things about Adestra (and its new data-driven Audiences module) is that it helps you leverage your Adestra data to create unique views of subscribers – something difficult to achieve with traditional filtering – allowing for more precise segmentation and targeted email marketing.

Technique 1 – Visually Building Your Audience

Long gone are the days of clunky filters that only somewhat achieve your segmentation goals. If that sounds familiar, I invite you to consider using a visual builder. It’s the next-gen segmentation technique.

Using an intuitive, drag and drop audience builder (like Adestra’s new Audience Designer) helps marketers visually create multi-datapoint audience segments, making it much easier to tailor campaigns to specific audience needs or preferences.

Building your audience in this visual way allows you to instantly preview your crafted audience size and breakdown, enabling more informed decisions and adjustments on the fly. In the image below, you can see we’re building an audience who have engaged in the last 30 days AND have clicked on a product email, resulting in an active and interested audience segment. I could take it further and segment by customer value, geographic location, or physiographic factors for example, which would make my emails even more personalized and effective.

Real-world example: A digital magazine publisher wants to improve their email marketing results and opts to use a visual audience builder to easily segment their audience based on:

• Email engagement data (e.g. high, moderate, or low engagement)
• Subscription history (e.g. long-term, new, lapsed subscribers)
• Customer lifecycle stage (e.g. young professionals, parents, or retirees)

Using the above segments, they create a precise audience of ‘highly engaged, long-term subscribers who are young professionals’, who are likely to be highly interested in career development articles, industry news, and networking opportunities. By targeting this specific segment with tailored content and offers, the publisher can increase engagement, improve subscriber retention, and drive higher conversion rates for premium content and events.

Technique 2 – Visually Exploring Your Audience Data

While a visual audience builder is an incredibly powerful tool for crafting precise audiences, there may be situations where deeper insights are needed to help you uncover hidden trends or optimize your targeting strategies.

For instance, you might be seeking new opportunities within your audience data or aiming to identify specific intersections between different data points. This is where a completely unique technique, like Adestra’s new Audience Intersections, comes in handy to help you explore your data using Venn diagrams.

Venn diagrams are useful for marketers as they have the powerful ability to simply visualize and combine data, while remaining easily navigable. In the GIF below, you can see that we’ve added data for the 2022, 2023, and 2024 subscription years. Then, on the right hand-side, with just one click, we’ve changed the view from total number of subscriptions to number of subscribers for those years. Now we can visually see the number of subscriptions year by year, as well as the engaged audience who subscribed each year.

Let’s pause for a moment – how easy is it for you to currently view your data in this way? For some marketers, this level of data visibility wouldn’t be possible without a lot of manual effort, or assistance from a Data Analyst or IT. However, with simply using a drag and drop Venn diagram, you can now overlap and analyze audience data yourself. This empowers you become more informed about the customer data you have and, more importantly, how to use it to create high-performing campaigns.

Real-world example: A digital media company in health and wellness aims to boost revenue by targeting a new audience segment in its email campaigns. They use a Venn diagram to visually explore and identify specific subscribers within the following categories:

• Highly engaged (e.g. frequent clickers on their weekly nutrition articles)
• High-value purchasers (e.g. purchase history of buying wellness event tickets)
• Subscription member (e.g. recently renewed their subscription)

By intersecting their audience like this, it helps them avoid over-messaging certain subscribers while identifying high-value recipients for a targeted campaigns to promote an upcoming wellness event or a special edition of their publication. By targeting high-value subscribers with special offers, the digital media company maintains their interest and loyalty, while increasing the likelihood of future purchases.

Crafting Your Email Masterpiece

It’s important to note that building an effective audience is an ongoing process and it is best practice to continually refine your segments to maximize email engagement and ROI.

Ensure you are A/B testing different audience segments, along with testing different elements of the email such as subject lines, content, and CTAs, to see what drives higher conversions across your campaigns.

In summary, investing time in audience segmentation maximizes your data’s impact. Smarter email audience segmentation is key to successful email marketing, and we’ve seen just how easy Adestra’s new Audiences makes for marketers to create hyper-targeted, high-converting email campaigns with ease.

Curious about how Audiences can benefit your organization? Schedule a demo with us – either speak with your CSM or, if you’re new, get in touch with us today!

Final word from us at Adestra

“Adestra users can now unlock untapped opportunities within their customer data, giving marketers valuable insights to drive success and allowing them to focus on generating more demand, while driving revenue growth.” said Shawna Weaver, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Audience Engagement products at Upland Software.

You might also be interested in this recent blog post: The Power of Data Visualization in Email Marketing