To gain subscriber trust and confidence, you need to make them feel that you are interested in what they want or need and then give it to them. It may seem doing so would require individual communications for each reader and a huge investment of time, but it doesn’t have to be that complicated. You can target marketing or fundraising communications to groups of people based on various traits that they have in common (and you can compliment these efforts with testing and user surveys). It will take some time and effort, sure, but so does anything that’s worthwhile. Your customers will repay your effort with loyalty and recommendations.

In this paper, we will first address targeting methods. Then, we will clarify some of the methods that cannot be explained in just a sentence or two. Finally, we’ll tell you how to sort and setup targeteted emailing lists, so that you can send different messages to each target group that you devise.

TARGETING METHODS

Before you get started with targeted emails, e-marketing expert Dave Chaffey recommends that you first think about your e-communication efforts as a whole and consider which aspects are most important for your organization for the current campaign:

• The creative elements—design and layout of the mail shot
• The offer—the proposition or benefits of responding
• The timing—season, month, day, time when the item is delivered
• The targeting—segment(s) targeted

You should decide on the relative importance of each for your purposes and number them accordingly. For example, the owner of an art gallery may regularly rank creative elements foremost in importance, whereas a retailer running a clearance sale on women’s briefcases may perceive of targeting as the most crucuial part of her message. Once you know this, you can divide the time you have for developing the campaign accordingly.

Next, determine how extensively to target your messages and by what method. Below, we list the most commonly-used targeting methods:

1. Demographic targeting—age, gender, geography. This can be important for business-to-customer (B2C) markets
2. Targeting by company type—used for business-to-business (B2B) campaigns
3. Targeting by product—categories of purchase. For instance, hardware versus software buyers. If you wanted to find out who brought product X and offer them on accompanying product Y, this would be a good way to target those who have one but not the other
4. RFM targeting (explained in more detail in the next section)—recency of purchase, frequency of purchase, monetary value of purchases
5. Customer value over a fixed period of time
6. Lifetime value of the customer (LTV)— this is the net value that a group of customers provide over their entire relationship with your company. It’s based on estimating company income and costs associated with customers over a set time period and calculating present value using a discount rate applied over the same time period.
7. Customer loyalty (explained in greater detail below)—length of time with the company and RFM.
8. Time on your subscriber list, in months
9. Responsiveness to email campaigns

These are not the only criteria you can use, and it may be that your organization’s best fit for targeting is specific to what you do. You don’t have to stick to just one type of targeting, either. You can test one type out for one campaign and try out a different set on another, depending on what makes the most sense at the time. For instance, you would certainly want to target men for a sale on men's shoes.

Many of the aforementioned targeting methods are fairly self-explanatory, but the next sections will address two that may require more clarification: RFM and customer loyalty targeting.

RFM TARGETING

Divide subscribers into RFM groups by sorting and scoring subscribers by:

RECENCY of purchases

0. Unknown

1. Within 12 months

2. Within 6 months

3. Within 3 months

4. Within 1 month

      
FREQUENCY of purchases
 

0. Unknown

1. Every 6 months

2. Every 3 months

3. Every 2 months

4. Monthly


MONETARY value of purchases¹ 

0. Less than $10

1. $10 to $50

2. $50 to $100

3. $100 t0 $200

4. Over $200

Assign customers the appropriate number for each category, then group them into lists according to their three scores. Every person with a 4, 1, 3 combination (in any order) goes into one list. Every customer with a 3, 2, 4 combination (again, in any order) goes into another list, etc. These lists are your segments.

CUSTOMER LOYALTY TARGETING

Customer loyalty happens in stages. You can develop your own terms and measures, if you like, but here is a basic set of loyalty measures:

1. New customers who have set up an online account with you
2. New customers who have shopped with you but have not set up an account
3. Developing customers—those who have set up accounts and who have been shopping on your site for at least six months
4. Established customers—those with accounts who have been shopping on your site regularly for at least one year
5. Dedicated customers—those who have been shopping on your site regularly for two years or more
6. Logged off—customers formerly from any of the levels above who have recently stopped shopping at your online store (the goal is to get these ones back)

Again, depending on how much importance you have placed on targeting, you may with to subdivide the groups for a deeper level of targeting. How? That will vary depending on whether you are primarily business-to-customer or business-to-business. Here are some examples of potential subdivisions by focus:

B2C                                                                        B2B

Age                                                      Size of company
Gender                                                  Industry sector
Geography                                             Title of contact

CREATING TARGET SEGMENTS IN EZ.NEWSLETTER

Once you have decided what kind of targeting you want to do, you have to create your target segments. To do so, start from the main page of your account, then:

1. Click on customer.management
2. Next select customers.manage 

In the left hand sidebar on this page, you can select customers by various criteria, and even use multiple levels of critera. The first set of selections include name, address, company, zip code, country, and email information, and you can filter for contacts that are like, not like, equal to, or  not equal to the search terms you supply, or filter for contacts that begin or end with your search terms. The second set of terms is for product name and SKU. The last set cover orders, products, product prices, shipping information, discounts applied, and taxes applied in quanitities greater than, less than, or equal the amount you supply. You can use these sets of search criteria individually or together in any combination. If you need additional search criteria, click More Options near the bottom of the sidebar.

When you have selected your search criteria and set the terms, click Filter near the bottom of the sidebar to run the filter. The contacts who fit your terms will appear on the screen and you can either filter them into an existing mailing list or save them as a filter using the appropriate link above the contacts. If you click Save This Filter, you will be asked to name the filter and provide a description of it. If you choose to Filter Into A List, you will need to select which list and decide whether or not to include unsubscribed contacts on the list and whether you want to save the filter or not. Please note that, if you want to start a new mailing list with filtered addresses, you will need to set up a blank list in list.management before filtering addresses.

If you want to add new customers who match your filter criteria to the same list, you will want to save the filter to have it run automatically. Automatically running filters run every minute.

When filters are used to move customers into lists in this manner, the lists react differently than they do when you upload contacts or add them one at a time by hand. Normally, a list will only contain an email contact once. However, when filters put customers into lists, emails can be in the list once for each order number. This does not translate to duplicate messages sent to the same contact, though. The ez.newsletter system automatically ignores duplicate addresses when sending an unscheduled message. But the multiple entries do serve an important purpose: they allow for any automated responses you set up to be associated with each individual order by a customer.

Schedules can then be used to set up autoresponder messages for these lists. If, for instance, you want to have an automated message including shipping information go to each customer every time they place an order, you could schedule that through schedule.manangement. The paper on autoresponders will provide more specific instructions about how this works, and how to customize these autoresponses.

Now that you know more about targeting options and how to make targeting work for you, put a little time into planning special messages and make your customers even more satisfied.

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