Your Audience Isn’t a Monolith

By now it’s conventional wisdom: your audience is not a monolith, and you shouldn’t communicate with them that way. Online communications are particularly well suited to segmentation – thinking about your audience in terms of subgroups – but all communications can benefit from a bit of strategic thinking about what makes different subgroups of your list more and less open to different messages, approaches, asks, and channels.

If you’re among the lucky communicators with access to data from past communications campaigns, you can analyze past results by different groups and establish a segmentation approach based on the hard work you’ve already done.

If you’re building your segmentation approach from the beginning, here are three things you can take a look into for opportunities to better target your communications:

1. Level of Engagement: People who have volunteered for you could receive different communications than those who have just signed up for information; advocates who donate could be approached differently than advocates who haven’t donated yet; people who always read your emails could be approached differently than those who never read them (as determined by your handy dandy software). What different levels of engagement do subsets of your audience have with your organization, and are there ways you can communicate with them better to acknowledge their current commitment and inspire them to commit more?

2. Demographics: 20-somethings and 60-somethings not only get their information from different channels, but they interact with those channels in different ways. There’s evidence that men and women utilize online communications differently, and mounting evidence that age and geography have an impact on how people respond to direct mail. Does it make sense for you to think further about the demographics of your audiences?

3. Content: The Humane Society of the United States is famous (at least in certain circles) for effectively targeting dog lovers separately from cat lovers to inspire ever-higher levels of activism and contributions. Is there anything in your content — training versus job board programs, international versus domestic policy focus, child-related services versus senior services — that might make a difference to different subsets of your audience?

Segmentation is a complex science as well as an art, and is always a work in progress, but these days, as options for targeting messages grow ever-more sophisticated, you can’t afford not to give it a try.

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