The future of marketing lies within personalized, unique audience experiences. And the time has come for nonprofits to develop their audience journeys through audience segmentation. Running your marketing department without a solid understanding of your audience translates to wasted time, ineffective campaigns, and tons of unsubscribes. 

 

Giving – whether it be actual money, time, or simply attention – has become a deeply personal thing. So you HAVE to make sure you understand who you’re talking to, how they want to be talked to, and what messages and information they value. 

 

How do you segment your audience?

 

We’ve covered several data groups before, but here are the pieces that will help you create audience segments that work:

 

  1. Demographic data. Your audience’s A/S/L. This information generally won’t change, though it could, but this can help with segmentation, personalization, and any automated emails.
  2. Preference. This could be collected on some type of preference center within your email platform. It could be types of emails they want to receive, frequency, topics they care about, etc. This isn’t something that a person will be able to just offer up. You’ll have to add this data collection step to your funnel so they have to fill it in. 
  3. Transactional. Identify how they engage with your organization. Are they donors (large, small, recurring, lapsed)? Maybe they’re volunteers or event attendees or program participants. Whatever they are, you need to label them properly and make sure that you tailor their experience so that it’s relevant.
  4. Behavioral. This could be anything from email opens and clicks, to what types of links they tend to click on. Your email marketing platform likely has something that can help you with this. MailChimp creates a “profile” of sorts for each audience member and can show you their habits. 

 

How do you segment your audience? Tell us in the comments below!

Want to download the entire ebook, “Decoding Audience Data to Optimize Your Reach”  Click HERE!