One-size-fits-all marketing doesn’t cut it anymore. Now, audiences expect personalized experiences. That’s why when it comes to contact management, audience segmentation is crucial.  

Breaking your contact lists into audience segments enables you and your partners to target consumers based on characteristics that are unique to that group of individuals, allowing you to personalize your messaging to better cater to those consumers. As a result, you can expect more effective marketing. 

Contact management is the process of recording, storing, updating, and tracking consumer data, including leads, prospects, and customers, for the purposes of facilitating communications. Commonly collected contact information includes: 

• Individual’s name 
• Job title 
• Company name 
• Email address 
• Phone number 
• Location 

Contact management ensures that all customer data is accurate, easily accessible, and organized, facilitating seamless and efficient customer interactions. This process ultimately streamlines communications between brands and consumers, improves deliverability, and creates a clearer path for audience segmentation.

Audience segmentation is the process of strategically dividing your customer base into groups — or audience segments — characterized by similar qualities or attributes. These segments are created with the goal of delivering more relevant marketing communications tailored toward each distinct customer type. By targeting these segments with more personalized messaging, brands can form meaningful customer relationships and increase conversions. 

Audience segmentation delivers many key advantages, such as: 

• Driving engagement: The better your marketing is geared toward your intended audience, the more likely these consumers are to engage with your materials and communications. 
• Increasing conversions: Because audience segmentation uses personalized marketing to attract consumers, this tactic drives more customers to convert. 
• Boosting revenue: With a higher likelihood of conversion comes greater revenue potential. 
• Building stronger relationships: Segmented audience messaging resonates more with consumers than generalized communications, helping brands drive loyalty and develop more meaningful relationships with their audiences. 
• Unlocking insights: By separating your audience into segments, you can better observe what tactics work best for each group and use those insights to guide your marketing strategy. 
• Gaining a competitive advantage: Brands that leverage audience segmentation see greater results than those that deploy one-size-fits-all marketing. 

Here’s how to elevate your direct mail and email contact management strategy with audience segmentation. 

You can’t manage contacts that don’t exist. Start by collecting customer information to add to your contact list. You can gather this data from a variety of sources, such as:  

• Website tracking 
• Digital forms 
• Newsletter subscriptions 
• Customer transactions 
• Surveys 
• Social media 
• CRM software 

Remember to always collect and use customer data in accordance with applicable privacy regulations, consent requirements, and company policies. 

Once you’ve gathered your data, you can upload it to your email or direct mail marketing platform.

There are many ways you can segment your audience — the key is determining which segmentation criteria makes the most sense for your brand, partners, and industry.  

Types of characteristics you can use to divide your audience include: 

• Demographics: This encompasses basic information like age, income, education, occupation, gender, and marital status.  
• Psychographics: Psychographic segmentation groups people by personal characteristics like interests, hobbies, and values.  
• Behavior: Behavioral attributes refer to how someone interacts with your brand, such as page visits, purchase frequency, product usage, and loyalty. 
• Geographics: You can segment your audience geographically at the country, state, city, or regional level. 
• Device usage: You can differentiate your customers by the type of device they use, such as mobile or desktop. 
• Customer journey stage: Categorize your audience by their stage in the buyer’s journey, including top of the funnel (awareness), middle of the funnel (consideration), and bottom of the funnel (purchase). 

Now that you’ve created audience segments, you can develop personas for each of these groups. Buyer personas are fictional representations of a specific audience type that help you better understand their needs and motivations. Creating these profiles for each of your segments is a good way to bring them to life and target them more effectively.  

Once you’ve created your segments and buyer personas, you can begin personalizing your messaging to each group. Try experimenting with different strategies, content, and offers to see which resonates best with each audience segment.  

For example, say you’re an automotive brand that’s segmented your target audience by psychographic characteristics: 

• Segment 1: Known ATV enthusiasts 
• Segment 2: Interested in cross-country travel 
• Segment 3: Values raising a family 

You can easily gear your marketing toward these groups’ specific interests, hobbies, and values to increase the likelihood of engagement and conversions.  

For example, you may send Segment 1 an email highlighting your brand’s newest dirt bike models, while Segment 2 receives a tire ad focused on durability and longevity, and Segment 3 gets a blog that compares the safety features on various minivan models. All three segments receive communications specific to their own psychographic characteristics. 

It’s important to regularly monitor the performance of your marketing communications to determine if your audience segmentation strategy is working and whether changes should be made to improve it. Additionally, audience behaviors may change over time, meaning segments will need to be audited and adjusted to reflect these shifts.  

The more closely you evaluate your performance, the better equipped you’ll be to optimize your marketing. 

When leveraging audience segmentation in your email contact management, there are some considerations you should keep in mind. Follow these best practices to get the best results from your marketing efforts: 

• Avoid excessive segmentation: Creating too many segments or segmenting too granularly often results in extensive time and effort spent creating materials for an audience that’s too small. This can reduce your overall reach and waste valuable resources. Stick to a handful of broader segments to keep things manageable. 
• Perform regular data audits: Inaccurate customer data can negatively impact your segmentation strategy. Audit your contact lists regularly to ensure all information is accurate, complete, and up to date. 
• Leverage multiple channels: Meeting customers where they are means communicating on all the channels they frequent. Try diversifying the channels you market through to reach more consumers. 
• Set KPIs: Establish KPIs to measure your segmentation efforts over time, such as engagement rate, click-through rate, or conversions. 
• Invest in a contact management system: Make organizing and tracking your audience data easier and more efficient with a centralized contact management system. 

If you’re looking to leverage a reliable contact management system to better manage advanced segments from your contact lists, there are some qualities and features you need to get the most value from your investment: 

• Ease of use to remove complexity 
• Seamless integration to ensure accurate, pain-free data transfer 
• Reporting and analytics to track marketing performance 
• Data centralization to eliminate silos and duplicative information 
• Workflow automation to minimize time-consuming manual processes 

Create advanced segments from owned and purchased leads with Ansira. This brand-to-local marketing platform helps brands and their partners seamlessly deploy personalized, one-to-one customer targeting across email and direct mail while leveraging insightful data activation. 

Learn about Ansira Connect.