At a recent session for DrupalCon 2016, I attended a wonderful session this morning, Targeting Your Digital Audiences: Multichannel Segmentation Strategies with tons of insightful, thoughtful tips from the speaking team of Jessie Lamb, Senior Web Analyst, and Mercy Corps and Anne Bell-Fysh, Digital Marketing Strategist at Mercy Corps.
I unfortunately neglected to attribute each quote to each speaker, but the wisdom and helpfulness shouldn’t be diminished.
Within audiences we weren’t looking to see what’s really going on. When we looked, we found the same people responding over and over. But a whole group, we weren’t reaching. The result was a predictable communication outcome. If we had looked over the past five years, we would have seen they were never responding. We had the data.
“It’s easy to send people the same message in social as you do via email with the tools that are available now.”
We found out we can load our eCRM lists and load them into Facebook’s custom audience tools
We know if we have five digital touches, people tend to donate.
We used a newsfeed ad because you get more space for your message
It’s important to have a control and test approach, and thinking out our full year, and running a full control-test model.
We know what the optimized experiences should be. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel everytime.
Make sure you have staff and budget when choosing tactics.
Document things very carefully when choosing audience segments. It can keep you from looking stupid.
Understand that not everyone in your org is going to have the expertise, so it takes time to bring people up to speed.
Privacy: Some people get a little “squishy” when they realized they’re being tracked.
Understand that you’re looking at AUDIENCES and not SPECIFIC PEOPLE. Avoid drilling down too much.
Just because you have the resources and the staffing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have the time.
If you keep going down the rabbit hole, eventually your day is lost. We can create a situation where we’re not productive. Avoid targeting the five people who really care about X. That’s more for our major gift officers, not the digital marketing team.
If you’re using Google Analytics, the demographics tools have finally gotten to a point where that information is actually useful.
GA Retargeting tools – you can build out audience segments. Most of the time our audiences aren’t overlapping. So we built them out as segments. That allows us to see what’s going on with just them. It also allows us to build them out as an audience for re-targeting. We can access that audience in DoubleClick without adding additional pixels to our site.
Consider KISSMetricks for tracking one-on-one behavior. You can add to email, and track engagement on a variety of platforms.
If we take the time in the morning to evaluate campaigns, it can save us time by showing us what we don’t need to pursue.
If it’s not working, don’t do it. … Detach from it emotionally. You might see greater impact somewhere else.
Use Facebook and Twitter pixels to build custom audiences, if you don’t have an email list you can use.
Measure your results with the people who hold the budget strings.
We’re moving to the Donor Drive platform soon.
Qualitative vs Quantitative data: I come from the math world. People do what they do and math tells you what happens. We also do get great quotes from our donors too. When we get it right, we usually get both.
If we lose certain audiences via email, we can get them back via social media.
Getting started with targeting on Social: Look at what your Facebook audience wants from you and what your Twitter audience wants from you and start there.
We are trying to get as much info into our eCRM (ActionKit), they’re really flexible so it works well for us. We have a SQL DB that pulls in from Raiser’s Edge and our eCRM. It’s a lot of work, but it’s really beneficial. Try not to use too many platforms. … KISSMetrics has been really helpful to us. Getting as much info into that tool from social etc. really gives us a more 360-view of that person. A lot of times we’re downloading data from one platform, throwing it into Excel and checking it. It’s never going to be seamless.
We are developing an engagement score that includes opens, clicks and others. We’re trying to identify the bottom 50 percent and are the least engaged.
Social media users tend to click because they’re curious. I tend to think of them as an initial digital touch focus. This could be their first introduction for these people, so making sure you give them a good landing page experience is important.
When we changed messaging with some test audiences, while we got increased engagement and donations, we also saw unsubscribes go up. But that’s ok. If you’re not losing a lot of subscribers.
Social media data, for whatever reason, really impresses CEOs.
Mercy Corps is a little unique as it started as a fund-raising organization. Our marketing team is only three years old, so fund raising has really managed the metrics.
Asking people what the numbers they present to you means to them is a great way to start the conversation about what is valuable.
