Happy Fathers Day! It’s Time to… Segment?
That’s right; a major U.S. Holiday, Father’s Day, is coming up on June 18. Any marketer or ecommerce entrepreneur worth their salt knows to make the holiday work for them. The first thought that might come to mind is to take advantage of the holiday to promote your products and come off as more personable to your audience – all tied together with a nice “Happy Father’s Day!” message. But here’s something you may not anticipate from your well-intentioned marketing strategy:
You could be alienating or isolating your audience. For many, Father’s Day can be a traumatic day or simply uncomfortable. Some individuals may have lost their fathers, while others may have a strained relationship with their parental figure, and receiving a barrage of marketing emails celebrating the day that might bring up difficult memories doesn’t help. You don’t want to potentially lose your customers, but you also don’t necessarily want to miss the opportunity to market to them either. So what’s an entrepreneur to do? We’ve been on this topic a lot lately, but it really is crucial to your operation’s growth to learn more about segmentation and how it can help you avoid these awkward, alienating moments for some of your audience.
Over the past few newsletters, we’ve been talking about and conceiving of segmentation over the last few newsletters as a strategy that will separate our audience so that we can send personalized messaging to our audiences. Really, in terms of Father’s Day marketing, we can think of segmentation in the same way. It’s not that you’re segmenting your audience so that you can send a Father’s Day email to some and not to others.
One way you can do this segmentation successfully is to segment based on interests that might group your audience in a way that allows you to personalize the Father’s Day messaging. Maybe for one group, you can send out the standard marketing email for the holiday, while for another, you can send a totally different email that doesn’t even mention the holiday if you don’t want it to– while still offering the deals, of course. You could even acknowledge the holiday in a cheeky way that might attract some of your customers to click on the email. An example might be a subject line that says “Father’s Day? Not for us!” or “Check inside for some anti-Father’s Day Deals!”
If you’re working with a list that you don’t have much audience information on, we also want to encourage you to experiment during this time. Try to think about what interests, hobbies, or other segmentable points of data might align with someone who might appreciate Father’s Day… and the opposite. Even if your campaign doesn’t fare well financially, it can still give you really valuable data about the audiences you chose. If your guesses and insights do produce positive results, then you know more definitively about all the different segments in your audience. If it doesn’t fare well, that also tells you something valuable: that you need to keep discovering your audience. All data is useful data when it comes to your audience, you just need to know how to interpret and use it to your benefit.
And there you have. Yet another way that segmentation can be wielded to yield results for you– to help your audience feel more included, considered and best of all, like they still want to engage with you and your business. We hope this is useful advice for you– but it’s up to you to wield it.
