Audience Segmentation

I could give a pretty extemporaneous speech on why Michael Jordan is the best basketball player ever and I think people would find it interesting…unless I was talking to a group of 6 year old girls. No matter how passionate you are on a subject audience matters.
Below is an excerpt from an article about how one person helped her company understand this simple principle of marketing. Sometimes audience is everything:

If…you inherit audience segments from other departments, it often isn’t enough to tell them how they could have done better – you need to show them. Start small and look at ways you can logically break up a segment (into more granular, logical targets) so that you can provide some analysis about program performance.

This is a very common strategy when evaluating engaged versus unengaged subscribers. I worked with one brand that simply started breaking out the engaged and unengaged subscribers to identify more cohesively the segment that was driving meaningful lifts in revenue. The marketing team was reluctant to suppress these unengaged folks from their email sends for fear that they would be leaving revenue on the table. Simply segmenting out that audience for clearer tracking revealed that they were, in fact, contributing negligible revenue to the program and were actually driving the majority of all the spam complaints.

By following this simple segmentation and testing strategy, you can provide the insight, backed up by solid data, to grab a seat at the proverbial table. At the same time, you benefit by garnering terrific insight into how your audience segments perform, and can better inform future decisions.

(via Clickz)