Tailor your mailings with new, smooth functionality

What is a target audience?

Before we discuss how you can tailor your mailings with MarketHype, let's explain what a target audience is.

A target audience is a selected group of people you direct your marketing efforts, products, and/or services towards. By identifying specific target audiences and tailoring your communication to them, you can make recipients more likely to open your mailings, purchase your products, and then recommend them to friends and family.

By identifying and understanding your target audiences, you can more effectively tailor campaigns, newsletters, and offers to meet their specific needs and desires. This often leads to higher engagement and increased sales.

Base your target audiences on characteristics

A target audience is usually defined by various types of characteristics:

• Demographic characteristics – such as age, gender, income, education level, and profession.
• Geographic characteristics – such as country, city, and neighborhood.
• Psychographic characteristics – such as values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle.
• Behavioral characteristics – such as purchasing behaviors, product usage, and brand loyalty.

You can choose to base a target audience on a single type of characteristic, like demographic or geographic characteristics. You can also opt to base your target groups on combinations of characteristic types, like demographic and behavior-driven features.

10 examples of target audiences

Target audiences can be both broad and narrow. A broad target audience could consist of either women or men (demographic characteristic). A narrow target audience might include guests who have previously purchased at least five tickets in the last year (specific buying behavior) and are between 18 and 35 years old (demographic characteristic). Here are ten examples of target audiences:

1. Hard rock enthusiasts
People who have previously attended a specific hard rock concert and/or a concert tagged with hard rock.

2. Theatergoers
People who have previously visited your theater, regardless of genre and number of purchases.

3. Families with children
People who have previously purchased children's tickets, rented children's ski equipment, or similar.

4. Residents of Gothenburg
People who live in or just outside Gothenburg. Of course, you can target several different cities with your communications.

5. Young adults
People between the ages of 18 and 25 looking for entertainment and fun.

6. Wellness enthusiasts
People interested in health and well-being.

7. Culture and history buffs
People who appreciate historical sites, museums, or cultural events, including opera and orchestral performances.

8. School groups
Educational groups looking for educational excursions for students.

9. Cheering squad
Loyal fans who frequently attend their team’s ice hockey or football matches.

10. Silver subscribers
People who have a silver subscription with, for example, a symphony orchestra.

Is a target audience the same as a segment?

No, a target audience and a segment are not exactly the same. They differ somewhat:

Segmentation is the process of dividing a broader audience into smaller, more uniform groups. You base the segments on the same characteristics used to create target audiences: demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics, where each segment consists of people with similar characteristics, needs, or behaviors.

A target audience, on the other hand, is the specific group that you then choose to direct your marketing efforts towards. The target audience included can be one or more of these segments, but it can also be other customer groups. Working with target audiences offers more flexibility as it allows you to experiment with various customer divisions and filtering options.

In summary, all segments are potential target audiences, but not all target audiences are potential segments. Not all segments become target audiences that your business chooses to actually target.

Why should you tailor your mailings to target audiences?

Why should you direct your mailings to selected target audiences, really? We have already touched on why you should customize your content for target audiences. Here are five clear benefits:

1. Increased relevance

By adapting and directing your messages to different target audiences – and their specific needs and interests – your communication becomes more relevant to the recipients. This also makes the content feel more directly appealing to the specific target group.

2. Improved customer experience & credibility

When your customers receive mailings tailored to their interests and needs, the interaction with your brand feels more personal and valuable. This can in turn lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty as customers feel understood and appreciated.

But how can audience-customized content increase credibility? Well, by showing that you understand your recipients and customers and truly offer them something of value, you are also perceived as someone to be trusted. And that's what you want, right?

3. Higher engagement & conversion

Can relevant and valuable content that makes customers more satisfied and loyal get any better? Yes, it can! By providing your recipients with this type of audience-customized content, engagement and conversion rates will also increase. Audience-customized communication tends to be more persuasive.

When the message is tailored for a specific group, there is a greater chance that these individuals will act – whether it means opening your mailings, making a booking, or purchasing a ticket to your event.

4. More efficient use of resources

Directing your communication to selected, defined target audiences helps you use your marketing resources more effectively. Instead of broadly spreading messages without clear goals, you can focus on value-creating content that yields good results.

5. Increased understanding of your target audiences

The more you customize your mailings and content to target audiences, the more understanding you gain about your recipients. How so? Well, by choosing to target specific groups, you can also collect more in-depth data about these groups. These insights are crucial for you to further sharpen your marketing strategies.

Working with audience customization in MarketHype – a new feature that simplifies!

The foundation of MarketHype is to collect current data and provide you with customer insights, so that you can then direct your communication and marketing. This includes features for audience-customized content. With this platform, you gain greater customer understanding, increased sales, and stronger customer relationships all in one.

We have now taken a further step in the same direction. We have developed a feature that allows you to customize your mailings more easily and quickly than ever before. A feature that will change how you produce newsletters, campaigns, and informational mailings. We have chosen to call this feature: Display Filter.

What is "Display Filter"?

The new "Display Filter" feature is found in MarketHype’s email tool. The function is available for both "manual" emails and automatic emails (also called automations), and essentially allows you to target diverse audiences with a single email. This means that one email can have various looks and messages, depending on who the recipient is.

With "Display Filter," you customize parts of your mailing for various target audiences. For example, if you want women to see one headline and men another, you can do this using "Display Filter." Another example is showing one news item to a selected audience, and another news item to a different audience. In summary, with "Display Filter" you can tailor the mailings according to your preferences, and send relevant content to selected audiences.

How does "Display Filter" work?

To customize a mailing for different audiences and give it various appearances depending on who is receiving it, you click on the content you want to customize.

You can apply "Display Filter" to the following types of content:

• Full row – which can contain headlines, texts, images and buttons
• Heading
• Text
• Image
• Button
• Social media icons
• Footer

Once you have clicked on the content and are in selection mode, you choose "Limit which recipients should see this content." A side panel then opens up, where you filter who should see this type of content.

Examples of filters you can use:

• Subscribers
• Segments
• Contact attributes – such as age, gender, country and city
• Purchase behaviors – such as number of purchases, number of items per purchase, number of days between purchases, and/or average expenses
• Orders – for example, related to specific events or productions, a particular ticket type or event tag, and/or made on a specific weekday
• Marketing activities – for example, all who received, opened, and/or clicked in a previously sent SMS or email

You can use "Display Filter" multiple times in a single mailing, making the audience customization particularly powerful.

Adjustable preview ensures confidence

When your mailing with various audience customizations is ready, you obviously want to see what it looks like before you send it off. What will it look like if the recipient is a man? Or if the recipient belongs to the category "Pre-ordered refreshments"?

In preview mode, you have the opportunity to test your applied filters. With the help of toggles, you can turn your various filters/audience customizations on and off to see what the mailing looks like for different recipients.

You also get information about the size of the mailing, depending on the recipient. Keeping an eye on the size of your mailing is important as a too heavy email can have consequences. For example, it might be cut off, take a long time to load, or end up in spam.

Furthermore, from the preview mode, you can send test emails to your colleagues. Here you also have the opportunity to share a preview of the mailing you created via a link. Just like when you test the mailing yourself, you have the option to share different versions with your colleagues.