New Feature Alert! Audience Groups at Campaign Refinery

Audience Groups is a brand-new feature from Campaign Refinery that lets our users combine different segments into a group and target the new bundled audience with broadcast emails or drip campaigns.

At Campaign Refinery, we love to hear what our clients think. We believe by listening, we can create useful tools and features that help email marketers achieve their goals more quickly.

This is why we have a Feature Requests page for Campaign Refinery users. Here, our clients can learn about upcoming changes, vote for new features, and seek help from the community.

Audience Groups is a feature our clients requested and it will considerably simplify the life of email marketers using our software.

Here’s the story of why and how it came about.

Advanced Segmentation is the Future of Email Marketing

While basic segmentation is great at making content and email campaigns more relevant, advanced segmentation can take your email marketing to the next level.

Super-relevant emails lead to:

Advanced segmentation methods allow you to deliver the level of personalization today’s audiences crave, keeping your marketing strategy effective.

Basic list segmentation offers group-level targeting, but what if you wish to create highly specific audiences? Imagine being able to choose two completely different segments and email the subscribers of both segments in one go.

With access to such a feature, you can think of possibilities beyond basic criteria. You could create laser-focused campaigns that resonate deeply with each recipient.

And that is exactly the futuristic thinking we want to encourage at Campaign Refinery.

Introducing Audience Groups!

Audience Groups on Campaign Refinery: New Level of Segmentation

The email audience groups feature lets you choose different segments of your subscriber list with different criteria and group them for a specific campaign.

Take a look at your contact list. You have probably organized it into various segments.

The typical criteria for segmenting your audience include:

Demographics: Age, gender, income, occupation, etc.
Behavior: Purchase history, website activity, email engagement, and similar factors.
Geography: Location, time zone, city, zip code.
Interests: Preferences indicated during signup or through website interactions.
Custom fields: Depending on your industry, you can segment your audience using more specific data.

Segmenting allows you to craft email campaigns that resonate with each group’s specific needs and interests.

But what if you wanted to target multiple unrelated segments with the same campaign? Would you create an all-new segment you will never touch again?

Or would you manually send the campaign to each of those segments one by one?

That’s when Audience Groups can be a lifesaver!

This powerful feature lets you quickly combine different segments into groups and run email broadcasts or nurture campaigns to those groups.

The Benefits of Audience Groups

Once you get familiar with Audience Groups, it will add a new dimension of thought to how you can target your customers.

The advantages listed below are just the tip of the iceberg.

1. Highly Targeted Campaigns

By combining segments with different criteria, you can create hyper-specific audiences. This allows you to send campaigns that are incredibly relevant to a very narrow range of email subscribers.

Audience Groups’s superpower is its ability to combine two specific audiences:

Recently engaged (say, 30-day openers),
Recently added.

The recently added group consists of new signups from conferences, webinars, or perhaps they saw an ad. This segment would typically consist of people who signed up in the past 7 days.

The theory behind Audience Groups is to combine the recency of engagement and recency of addition. This helps make the most out of the fresh engagement and fresh knowledge of the audiences.

By creating an Audience Group, you can set two goals simultaneously:

You want those who engage to keep engaging,
You want those who learned about you recently to engage urgently, while your brand is fresh in their minds.

With our new feature, you don’t have to create a new segment for the recently added audience and email them separately. Instead, you can combine the recently added with the existing engaged audience. and transform them into those who engage sooner with new, relevant content.

In a nutshell, Audience Groups helps with:

High engagement rates, better opens,
Targeting recency and relevancy simultaneously,
Lower complaint rates.

For example: Consider two segments — the first, customers of High-Ticket Coaching, and the second, prospects who clicked to book a call with your sales team. With Audience Groups, you can target both of these segments and observe the benefits listed above.

2. Higher Conversion Rates

With Audience Groups, it’s not just about the ease of combining segments; you’re also more likely to resonate with recipients — and drive action.

3. Uncover Hidden Customer Insights

Combining different segmentation criteria can reveal hidden trends in your subscriber data. You might identify high-value customer segments with specific browsing and purchase behavior patterns. This allows you to tailor your entire marketing funnel to better target these valuable customers.

4. Improved Efficiency

Instead of needing multiple, slightly different campaigns, you can create a single, highly targeted campaign using your groups. This saves time and resources while ensuring maximum impact.

5. Staying Ahead of the Competition

Advanced segmentation methods like Audience Groups are becoming crucial in today’s competitive landscape. This feature allows you to deliver the level of personalization that audiences expect, maximizing the ROI of your email marketing operation.

How to Use Audience Groups

Are you excited to learn how to use this feature right away? It’s up and running, so here’s an Audience Groups tutorial to help you understand how it works.

First, we’ll explain how you can create new segments and then combine them into a group.

On the left menu pane, click on Search Contacts (it’s under Contacts).
Here, you can choose your search criteria from the App Fields tab or click on the Custom Fields tab and fill out the search fields.
Once you’ve filled in the fields, click on Search.
In the next window, confirm the search worked as intended and you have all the contacts organized by the specific criteria.
Type in a name for the segment and click on “Save as new segment.”
Repeat the process for any other segments you wish to combine into an audience segment.
Now click on Audience Segments under Contacts.
At the top, click on the Groups tab, next to Segments.
Next, click on the “+ Group” button to add a new audience group.
Type in a name for the group.
In the second field labeled “Audiences,” you can add segments. Start typing and options should auto-populate.
Click on “Create” at the bottom.
Your new audience group is now ready and can be accessed by going to Contacts>Audience Segments>Groups.