Segment Your Mailings for More Successful End of Year Campaigns

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The holiday season is upon us and it’s time to start planning your year end fundraising mailing. Even if you don't have an end of year mailing, you can always use this to help with your next mailing.  In this post, we'll primarily focus on the importance of personalizing your mailing through segmentation.

What do I mean by segmentation? According to Wikipedia it’s “marketing strategy that involves dividing a broad target market into subsets of consumers who have common needs, and then designing and implementing strategies to target their needs and desires using media channels and other touch-points that best allow to reach them.” In Altru terms, this means to break down your overall mailing into smaller targeted groups to personalize the mailing content to those smaller groups.

For example, maybe you are doing a year end appeal mailing to raise funds. Rather than sending everyone in your database the exact same letter, you can personalize the letter content based on an individual’s interactions with your organization. Maybe you send one version of the letter to high donors. Another version of the letter to individuals that visited 10 or more times throughout the year. Another version to members. Another version to volunteers and staff. And finally, the last generic version goes to everyone else.

We do this by creating queries in Altru to capture each of these segments. Once the queries are created, capturing each of the segments, you can create your Appeal Mailing.

When creating your Appeal Mailing, add a letter for each of your segments (queries). For example, in the High Donors letter thank them for making a large contribution, or in the Frequent Visitors letter thank them for regularly visiting your organization.

Once all letters are created and you've saved the Appeal Mailing, be sure to set the order of importance for the letters (see below). This is important because there may be overlap in the queries, meaning a person may appear in more than one of the segments (queries). In this case, the order of the letters matters because a person will only be included in one letter.

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Good luck with your mailing. Add a topic to the Community if you've segmented a mailing and want to let others know about your experience or if you’d like to ask a question.

Please check out our Appeals and Segmentation Miniseries (previously recorded) if you’d like to get some additional training on creating queries for segmenting an Appeal Mailing.

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