Ease Your Way Into Targeting
You want to start sending targeted emails, but don’t have a complete plan yet? Have an idea of an email to send to a specific region, but not the other regions? Have a category you want to send a special email to, but don’t know what to send the other categories?
Start by doing what you can. There’s nothing wrong with emailing a targeted message to a small part of your list and a generic newsletter to the rest—you’ve got to start somewhere and there’s no better time than now.
You can start targeting by using a category, or a region, such as state. Begin by making sure you have email addresses added to the category to which you’d like to send the targeted email. If you will be sending the email to a specific region, ensure you have some addresses to mail to in that region.
Let’s say you run a non-profit organization and you send out a monthly email newsletter. For your July newsletter, you realize you could target a message to your donors in the Chicago area. First, we’re assuming that you’ve been collecting city and state as well as other information. You either import this information with the email addresses, or you collect the information on your sign up form.
Create your regular generic email newsletter and create the newsletter for your Chicago recipients. Test each email by sending it to your personal email address(es). When it’s time to send your message, send the targeted message first. From the Send Message screen, you’ll want to show the Advanced Sending Options. For this example, we’ll target the list by region by selecting IL or Illinois (or both) from the drop down list for state. It’s a little broader in reach than Chicago, but it’s considerably more narrowed down than sending to your whole list. Send your message. It will go only to the members on your selected list that have the state IL in their profile.
How do you send the generic message to the rest of the list? From the send message screen show the Advanced Sending Options. This time you want to choose all states except IL. An easy way to do this is to CTRL click or Shift click to select all states and then CTRL click on IL to “de-select” it. Ensure that every state except the state(s) you already mailed to (IL) is selected. Because your subscribers can only have one state in their profile, you don’t need to worry about the message going to the recipients who received the first message. This message will only go to everyone that you selected and not to the recipients of your first message—the subscribers with IL in their profile.
Or, say you have a Category set up for people interested in donating their time to your organization. Set up the generic email and the email targeted to the subscribers interested in volunteering. When sending the message, show the Advanced Sending Options. Send the targeted message first and select the category that you want to include (the category for volunteers). Send the message. To send the generic message, you exclude the subscribers who got the first message by excluding the volunteer category—click the category for volunteers under the heading Exclude these Categories. This way, subscribers receiving the first message (those in the volunteer category) are excluded and won’t get the second message, but everyone else on your list will.
Even this very simple targeting can be a great enhancement to your email program. The important thing is to just start—get your feet wet and more targeting ideas will come forth in no time. Also, watch your open rates and click rates to the targeted groups rise—seeing real, tangible results might give you just the boost you need to think of more ways to target your subscribers.