Email Segmentation with ExactTarget & Data Filters

Trying to filter your newsletter subscribers to just those who live in Ohio? What about those who live in Ohio and have also purchased product from you in the last 30 days? This doesn’t have to be a late-night, red-eyed, pull-your-hair-out task. ExactTarget makes it almost too easy to segment specific subscriber groups to meet any requirements for your marketing initiative.

We recently held sessions with a number of clients to introduce them to the data filtering concept and utilities that ExactTarget boasts in its service. The introduction of this filter immediately spurred mini marketing brainstorm sessions.

The fact of the matter is most businesses already have immense data and tags for each customer or client that they store and update at various points in their relationships. ExactTarget provides a very flexible, intuitive method of importing this data and leveraging it to produce better click-throughs, opens and conversions.

The impact of sending specific marketing messages to a well-defined subscription list versus an all-encompassing subscriber bucket list is going to be very apparent.

To get started using data filters, you will want to make sure you have your subscribers' profile attributes defined and populated with relevant values.

Once you have your profile attributes set, you can then import an updated list that will update the subscribers’ profile attributes based on email address. Once imported, click through to "Subscribers," then "Data Filters" to create a new filter. You define the subscription list, the desired criteria or conditions to check against and the name of the group resulting from the filtering.

But wait, there’s more. You can even leverage specific measures from historic tracking into data filters. So say you have a product rolling out in the Midwest that you want to give a sneak peek to any customer who has purchased your product and/or is a loyal newsletter participant.

You can simply create a data filter looking for the subscribers who have purchased in the past and live in the Midwest (based on state = "Ohio," "Indiana," etc.) and then apply a measurement filter that looks for all subscribers who have opened or clicked on a newsletter three or more times in the last X amount of days.

Easily created, easily sent and the results of your segmentation will be easily digested by you and your team.

So take that extra time you save by using ExactTarget and get to the rest of that book you’ve wanted to finish.

Or, do as I would and research your upcoming Fantasy Football team ... which for me involves creating a screen-scraping Web service that compiles average player rankings and spits out justified draft orders according to a specific dataset in an algorithm.

About the author of this post:
Bruce Williams loves a good database schema and watching his team astonish clients with new JQuery tricks. He is the Data team manager at thunder::tech during the day (and occasionally at night). When he isn’t programming, he and his wife are pulling their kids through the neighborhood in their favorite wagon.