The more relevant you make your offer to a prospective customer, the more chance you have of gaining their business. Better Targeting is key, so what can you do without breaking the bank.

The Basics

There are complementing areas to consider, interests, groups and personalisation.

Interests

Imagine you are trying to sell wine online then your target market is people who drink or are interested in wine.

Groups

People fall into various groups. Groups include, age, gender, wealth, location and occupation. Taking again our online wine example, they will also need to be above the legal drinking age.

Personalisation

This digs deeper into the individual, the starting point is including a person’s name, to be more effective, additional information relevant only to that person can be added. This could be order history, offers and/or information associated with products they have bought. Where it gets really clever, is adjusting your offer to suit what you know about their preferences, this could be colours, car types or a myriad of other things.

 

Databases

Data lies at the heart of better targeting consequently any good database or CRM system will allow you to store and access a broad range of data fields. The problem all too often is that fields are wrongly defined, left empty on not maintained.

Maintaining a database is a cost of marketing the same as pay per click or other promotional charges. It is also a business asset. When a business is for sale, the customer base which equals data is often what an acquirer is after!

Implementation

The Interest and Group factors are easier to implement. Most marketing platforms can offer this level of segmentation. Web-Clubs for examples, through their various clubs, have target audiences of Homeowners, Gardeners, Travellers, Wine Lovers and more. Within each you can target by location, gender and age. If working with your own data, make sure it is is suitably configured and maintained. The latter is crucial to comply with GDPR.

Basic Personalisation, adding names is again widely on offer. What is more challenging is deeper personalisation. For email marketing, there needs to be integration between the email sending software and the database.