Introducing Serious Customer Segmentation

Have you ever wanted to send a message out to all of your female subscribers? What if you don’t have that information…wouldn’t it be nice to send a coupon for a free compact with makeup purchase to those that you know are women, and send a different offer to those that you don’t have gender data for?

Also, what if your makeup offer is valid everywhere except for Alaska? You know, since those free compacts might just crack in the cold arctic air. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to send a message to everyone in your database that you know do not live in Alaska?  To do this, not only would you need to be able to send the message to people who you know live in the other 49 states, but you’d also want to exclude everyone who you haven’t collected state data for, since those people could live in Alaska and therefore shouldn’t receive the message.

Finally, wouldn’t it be great to easily collect this data upon reply?

I’m excited to announce that you can now make all of these things happen within Signal. We just wrapped up a project to enhance our segmentation capabilities by enabling you to create more sophisticated segments for all of the scenarios above, and more. This will greatly improve your email marketing and mobile marketing efforts. Here are the details:

Learn More About Your Customers With “Absent/Present” Data Segmentation

Some specific improvements around data segmentation on existing, and non-existing data have opened a whole new world of opportunity that was not previously possible.  For example, you can now send a message to everyone on your list that you have a mobile phone number for (ie – they’ve opted in via SMS) but that you do not have an email address for with Signal. This is a great way to gauge interest in your email newsletter and build your subscriber base. This unique ability to message on the lack of data is a great way to learn more about your customers, without annoying those who’ve already shared that information with you. Here are some examples:

• Find contacts who do not have an email address
• Find contacts who do not have a mobile phone number
• Find contacts who do not have a city
• Find contacts who do not have a zip code (helpful for targeting at a local level)

For even more advanced needs you can combine absent and present value filtering. Say you’re a Chicago business in the clothing industry, and want to invite all of your subscribers that live outside the city of Chicago to a special event. You can do this with the Has value and is not filter criteria. This will help you reduce your marketing spend on this campaign by leaving out the unknowns, and focusing on the people you have data for. For example, the following filter would find all contacts that can be identified as having a city in their user profile, but exclude those that live in Chicago:

• Find contacts who have a city present in their user profile, and also where the city is not Chicago

Testing A Hypothesis With “Is Not” Attribute Segmentation

In addition to the benefits of the absent/present value segmentation, you can take advantage of is not or negated conditions. In this instance, you may or may not know if someone is a male, but as long as the answer is not female, you’re willing to send them a message. This type of segment is better for testing a hypothesis and messaging people you know have an interest in something, as well as those you think may be interested in something. For example, you could have collected Diet/Allergy data about your customers and can assume as long as vegetarian is not listed for your contacts, they might be interested in a meat lovers pizza. To set this up your criteria might look like this:

• Only show contacts that meet this criteria: Diet/Allergy: Is not: Vegetarian

While all of our filter methods using “is,” “is in list,” “is not in list,” before, at/on, and after work as usual, we’ve gained new functionality in the arena of absent/present, and is not attributes that can help you learn more about your customers, and test hypothesis.  We’re confident this can help you be a better marketer, and send more relevant content. We’ve even spent time improving the interface around creating segments to encourage this behavior. While this may sound confusing at first, it’s actually quite simple and delightful to use.

We’re really excited about this new functionality and think you will be to. We’ll be putting together a video of this functionality in action for you early next week.