Mastering Audience Segmentation: Optimizing Direct Mail Campaigns

In business, it’s important to remember that every audience is unique. Each comes with a specific set of characteristics, attributes, and preferences. Keeping in mind the individuality of customers can contribute greatly to the success of your business endeavors. To lay it simply, it would be quite foolish to promote milk to somebody who is lactose intolerant or mail a dog food coupon to a cat person. That is where direct mail segmentation comes in.

A successful direct mail data segmentation all boils down to customer data management and analysis. Your consumer database should include not just their contact information but also survey results and how and when they respond to your messages. Divide your customers depending on the following: 

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The most common way of dividing your recipients is through demographics. Categorize them depending on age, income, religion, gender, education level, occupation, marital status, family size, and more. Knowing these would help you know whether a consumer would be interested in the product or service that you offer or not. For instance, you don’t need to send promotions to men when your product is female-centric like sanitary napkins and feminine wash.

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If what you’re promoting is ideal for a certain area or location, segregate by region, state, city, zip code, or by street, or neighborhood. Businesses that sell beachwear should opt to send mail mostly to people who live near the beach. Likewise, winterwear should be promoted to places that experience frigid temperatures.

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Simply put, behavioral segmentation involves dividing customers based on their buying habits and behaviors. This type of segmentation tries to appeal to consumers who have already shown loyalty to your brand and those who share the same life stage. For example, you can rank customers by quintiles (groups of 20%). Those who belong in the upper quintile are the ones you should really focus your direct mail campaigns on to ensure that they keep coming back.

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Finally, psychographic segmentation involves dividing customers based on lifestyle, interests, and activities. While demographic segmentation narrows down your audience to male adults in their 30s who love playing sports, psychographic segmentation attempts to further segregate those who play golf. You can target these customers specifically in your direct mail campaign. 

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If your business is after innovative and individualized direct mail campaigns for your customers, Compu-Mail is the best place to start. Our Variable Data Printing guarantees all your print media are personalized to perfection. Through VDP, elements such as text, graphics, and images can be easily tailored for each printed piece without stopping or slowing down the printing process. What’s more, VDP allows audience segmentation to be done fast and efficiently, creating deeply personalized prints that are tailor-made for each of your recipients. Contact Compu-Mail today to learn more.