October 2017 - Reaching Your Target Audience

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Reach your marketing goals by understanding your audience better

As you develop a targeting strategy for your next direct mail or email campaign, what data do you turn to? Name personalization? Personalization by gender, age, or geographic region? This is
basic demographic targeting, and it is highly effective. However, there are other ways to think about your customers, as well.

Let’s look at four different ways to understand your audience.

1. Demographic data
This includes age, gender, ethnicity, and household income, but it also includes things like home equity, home value, and modeled credit. With demographic data, you can increase the relevance of your mailings, whether print or digital, based on general information.

2. Lifestyle data
These are data that pool target audiences based on common interest, such as fitness and wellness, green living, or pet ownership. Two people who look very different demographically may both love dogs or amateur photography. You can, however, use demographic data to refine lifestyle data. Retirees are more likely to own different breeds of dogs than twenty-somethings, for example, and retirees who are photography lovers may purchase different types of equipment or respond to different styles of messaging than younger buyers.

3. Life stages data
Whether we are young or old, rich or poor, male or female, we face common life stages. New parents deal with diapers, and recent college graduates need to furnish apartments. But while life stage data tap into windows of great opportunity, these windows tend to be short. For example, studies show that 38% of new movers buy flooring shortly after their move, but once that purchase is made, the window closes. Likewise, people on the verge of retirement may be thinking about a variety of life changes, but once they actually retire, most of the purchases associated with those changes will have been made and the opportunity will be gone.

4. Transactional data
We can infer a lot about someone based on what they buy. If they purchase a new pool, for example, they’ll likely be in the market for pool accessories, too. If they buy home improvement supplies, they might be in the market for new appliances. Transactional data also include channel preference, such as whether consumers tend to buy online or offline, through direct mail or email, and which days, months, or seasons they make their highest volume of purchases. These data help you understand not just what types of messaging to use with which customers but also which channels to use and when.

Want to learn more about any of these data types? Let us help!