One of the latest reality shows to hit the television airways is The Apprentice. Featuring billionaire Donald Trump, this show is a 13-week interview for 16 power hungry men and women, one of whom will have a yearlong apprenticeship with Trump himself if they make it through the series.  Each week, Donald eliminates a candidate for not making the grade.  In the second episode (which aired 1/15), Jason, the men’s team leader, was “fired” for not meeting with the client when handed an advertising task.  Jason (who reportedly worked in advertising before) and his team never found out what the client wanted and therefore, their ad campaign efforts fell short, the men’s team lost, and Jason was let go.

Well, newsletter publishers, take heart because the same lesson applies to you and your audience.  If you don’t take the time to find out what your audience wants then they might “fire” you by hitting your unsubscribe button as they receive undesirable content issue after issue.  This is where segmentation comes in.  Proper segmentation can mean the difference between winning or losing your audience all together, not to mention their interest and loyalty.  In this issue, we’ll discuss three key elements of segmentation – why you want to do it in the first place, what you’ll need to know in order to segment properly, and how to put your segmentation into action. 

Why segment?

If your newsletter audience is typical, it is comprised of a group of people who have a baseline common interest in you and your company.  Yet each member of this audience may have unique attributes, such as what part of the world they live in, what kind of job they do, and what their personal interests are. All these contribute to the fact that beyond the shared baseline interest, the reasons prospect A is interacting with your company may be completely different from those of prospect B. Much like the “square peg, round hole” theory, if you don’t find out what these differences are, the information in your newsletter may intrigue one group, while another turns a deaf ear on you. 

Segmentation does take a little work, but it’s worth the effort in the end.   If you take the time to do this, you will be able to continually feed each of your individual audiences relevant information issue after issue.  Your newsletter will slowly but effectively climb to the top of your subscribers “must-read” list and you will receive their vote of confidence by their continued loyalty.

What do you need to know?

In order to segment your subscriber list properly, you need information.  And this is the kind of information you want to look for:

• Readers’ preferences.   As a newsletter publisher, you have the ability to get information directly from your subscribers (in answers to surveys or polling questions) and you can also gather it indirectly via analytical reports that show what type of articles they read and, sometimes more importantly, what they don’t read.  This is key data that will be especially helpful later as you continue down the segmentation path. 
• Demographics:    You also want to establish what type of demographic information might play a role in how your readers make decisions regarding your products and services.  For instance, if they live in Florida, they most likely will never buy your snow shovels, but they may have an interest in garden shovels.  Demographics also include factors such as age group, gender, the industry they work in, and job function.
• Psychographics:   The characteristics of an audience based on their values, beliefs, trends, and attitudes are also important.  For instance, IMN is based in Newton, MA, and this is Patriot-territory (as in the New England Patriots, AFC Champions).  If you are marketing Carolina Panthers’ (NFC Champions) merchandise, you wouldn’t want to market to the employees of IMN, because common sense says that the majority of us (if not all) might have an attitudinal preference towards the Pats and will be rooting for them come SuperBowl Sunday.   
• Anything that relates to how people buy your products and services.  If customers are on your subscriber list, make sure you identify what product or service they have so you can cross-sell or up-sell other products and services.  If your prospects buy at a certain time of day, month or year, that’s important to know too.  Anything that will help move along or shorten your selling cycle is important to utilize in your newsletter programs. 

How do you put segmentation into action?

Once you find out the key segmentation criteria that differentiates each of your audience groups, you can then apply that information by following these easy steps:

a)      Divide your subscriber list into segments.   The first step for putting segmentation into action is to divide your subscriber lists into smaller groups, each set up according to appropriate criteria.   For instance, you might group customers together, then segment according to the products they own.  Or perhaps it makes sense to group prospects together based on where they live. 

b)      Version your newsletter.   Once you have your audience segments set up, you want to appeal to them according to their preferences.  Versioning can include any of the following:

• When you send out your newsletter.  If there are timely differences in the audiences, such as whether they prefer to read their newsletter on a weekday versus a weekend, then send out your newsletter at different times to get the highest amount of readership. 
• Article positioning.  Perhaps a certain article will capture the interest of Segment B (say Pats’ fans) more than Segment A (Panther fans).  For the Pat’s fans, move that article to the top of the page and for the Panthers’ fans, move it further down in the page.
• Newsletter content. There may be some articles in your editorial line up that will never be of interest to certain people in your subscriber list.  Going back to our shovel example, Floridians would only be interested in garden shovels, while people in snow belts would have an interest in both snow and garden shovels.  Simply put, if it doesn’t apply, don’t send it to them! 

Segmentation can be a little complex, but it is worth the effort.  For more information, you can view IMN CEO Kathleen Goodwin’s articles on ClickZ or our tips here in this issue on how to use IMN services to segment your subscribers.