Target Marketing is a vital part of the practices taught by the Bill Good Marketing System. The rule is that you should send every client and prospect something they might be interested in each month. List segmentation is vital for doing this.

The most basic form of list segmentation is dividing your target marketing by Status. As you can see on our Marketing Calendar, we have a separate list for Clients, Prospects, Connections, and Strategic Partners.

However, there are a lot of other ways you could segment your list, for example if you wanted to for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day letters. Or if you wanted to market to golf enthusiasts, or members of the local Rotary Club. Maybe you want to target clients who will need to make their RMDs in the next year. You may even find yourself in need of sending material to those who are holding certain positions in their accounts.

After Status, the most important filters for segmenting your database are Service Level, Age, and Categories. Though Service Level is used more for your SLM than it is for Target Marketing, so we won’t be discussing it here.

Plan Ahead

-Benjamin Franklin

The best practice is and always will be planning ahead. Use BGM’s Marketing Calendar or create your own mail plan. Talk with your coach about which is best for you. Or if you aren't currently working with a coach and are interested in what we can do for you, call us at 888-495-7303.

Track the Data

To segment your lists, you first need to accurately track the information you want to use to do so.

Track each Household you want to send Mother’s and/or Father’s Day letters to by giving it a Category for that type of card.

• Each year, prior to sending letters to this list, review each Household that has the Category.
• There are many reasons these two holidays might carry a negative emotional charge for a home. If you are aware of any such reason, remove the Category and do not send them one of these letters.
• If you do remove the Category for such a reason, consider a more sensitive and personal letter for that Household like This One.

Give the appropriate Households the Categories of golf or Rotary Club to market to those groups.

• This information can be gathered as part of the profiling process.
• It can be relayed to the team member in charge of updating the database via RUF.

Use Status, Age, and Birthday filters to track people whose RMDs are coming up.

• As we mentioned above, Status is a field that is set when they are entered into your system and updated only as their relationship to your office changes, like the transition from prospect to client.
• Birthdays should be gathered naturally for each client as you bring them on board.
• Age is automatically calculated once birthdays are supplied.

Segment the List

Once you are tracking the necessary data points, you can segment your list.

Do this by creating 3 or more filters:

• The first is the segment of your list that you want to target. For example: All clients who are members of the Rotary Club.
• The second is the rest of that portion of the list. For example: All clients who are not part of the Rotary Club.
• Additional lists for your prospects, connections, and strategic partners who will also be getting letters. You can subdivide each of these to target specific groups as well.

This lets you target the specific group you want to, while still following the rule that all clients and prospects receive a message that they are likely to be interested in each month.

Sometimes segmenting the list takes a little more effort than that. Below are several examples showing different segmentations you might want to use, and how to best go about it.

Mother’s or Father’s Day Letters

For Mother’s Day you will use the Status equals Client and the Category Equals Mother’s Day Card filters to segment those receiving Mother’s Day letters from those who are not. And the rest of the clients as well.

And the Father’s Day cards will use a similar set of filters:

Targeting Interests

When you target an interest, you want to include both the Category for the interest, and all the Statuses you will be mailing to:

Then when you are creating the opposite filter, you can break it into each Status you are sending a different letter to, for example:

That way you can mail the correct letter to each group, without overlapping.

RMDs Coming Up

This filter looks at any Contact who is a client, is currently 71 years old, whose 72>nd birthday is coming up this month or the next.

You can extend the range for the birthday filter as much as you want. This way you can begin planning the RMDs they will need ahead of time.

If you wanted to remove people whose RMDs have already been planned, you could add a Category “RMD Planned” and add the Category not equals RMD Planned filter. Then add that Category to Contacts once you plan their RMDs, removing them from the list.

This is useful for financial planning, but not necessarily for target marketing, so you don’t need to create the opposite list.