Use maths with your marketing
A lot of people feel maths at school was a waste of time, but it wasn’t, honest! When it comes to understanding how to target your marketing, there’s one part of maths that is invaluable: sets.
Do you remember sets?
I can remember spending many lessons dividing people into categories, or sets, and then creating a diagram showing how these categories overlap. It was called a Venn diagram when I was at school, but the name has probably changed now. There’s an example over on the right. You may have thought them useless at the time, but in fact they are very useful tool for marketing and are a fundamental part of the MailChimp system.
Apply sets to marketing
Say, for example, you are running an advanced workshop in marketing in Hereford and you want to send an email to everyone who might want to go on the course, as part of your campaign. If you make that email appeal to people who have such an interest but send it to everyone, then a lot of your contacts will view the email as junk and discard it without opening it. There’s no harm in this happening once, but if you start to send a lot of emails of which only a few are of interest to an individual, that person may get fed up and unsubscribe. It’s better to send an email just to the people who will be really interested and value your email.
1. Categorise your contacts
To target your emails or campaign, you need to be able to identify those individuals that:
- Live close to Hereford.
- Are interested in marketing.
- Have been on an introductory marketing course already.
Basically, you need a list with the names and a column for each criterion.
2. Create the selection rule
Then you can use the information to pick out all people who satisfy all the criteria and your list is targeted.
So how do I do this in MailChimp?
This is what MailChimp groups and segments are for.
Groups are the categorisation
Set up a group for each criteria. For example, you could have a group called “Location” and have various places listed to place people in: Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire, Gloucestershire… as many as you want. Then there would be a list of interests, including marketing, to provide the second criteria.
You could link up attendance at workshops to the list if you wish to provide the third criteria, or you may decide that is a step too far!
Segments are the slection rule
A MailChimp segment allows you to create a series of selection rules that target your list.
In our example, the first part of the rule would be
- “Pick everyone who lives in Herefordshire”,
the second part would be
- “Pick everyone who is interested in marketing”
Send the email to the segment
When you create your campaign, rather than sending it to the full list, you send it to the segment.
Getting more sophisticated with MailChimp
You can get even cleverer with MailChimp as there are lots of data fields available to you when defining your segment. You can, for example:
- Look at when someone joined your list (useful for anniversary emails or sign-up thankyous)
- React with another email when someone clicks on a link in the email
However, don’t get too carried away or there’ll be no time left to run your business.
If you want help
We’re happy to help and we also run public workshops on MailChimp.