Mailing List Segmentation

Christine Robertson 4

Are you interested in segmenting your mailing list to track the effectiveness of your appeal (and to make sure that you only send one version of the mailing to each constituent? Let's talk segmentations!!

Jaclyn Whitelock

@Christine Robertson Hi Christine! A bit late to this, but one thing I constantly run into with direct mail is shared households that do not involve spouses. How have you handled ensuring that only one person per household receives a mailing? I have thought of an attribute or solicit code, but hesitate lest I set one to be excluded, and at some point the primary member lapses and does not fit the mailing criteria, while the secondary remains excluded despite giving history.

Christine Robertson 4

@Jaclyn Whitelock Great question! There definitely isn't an easy answer for this one. It really hinges on your mailing list and the overall criteria there in addition to how these records are identified.

Let's say that we're at a school and mailing to Alumni and Parents. Our query criteria is that there is a constituent code of Alumni or Parent. We know that some of the Alumni still live with their parents and in those cases, we don't want to mail to the Parents.

If we have tagged those Parents as sharing an address with their Alumni, we could use a few queries with RE Mail - Quick Letters Segmentation to identify this:

• Query for all Parents and Alumni who are living, have valid addresses and want mail.
• Query of all Parents with the code of shared address
• Query of all Parents
• Query of all Alumni

When we use the segmentation, we can opt to assign the Appeal/Package so that we can group those Parents separately and then not mail to them. If you add the Appeals/Packages, you can then remove the ones for the “Package” that you don't want to mail to (in my example, I called it the “Hold” package).

Make sure that you sort your groups with intentionality - I put the “Hold” group at the top because a constituent can only fall into one segment and I don't want Parents who share an address to fall in any other group.

Here's are a couple of screenshots of what that Quick Letters/segmentation could look like:

Jaclyn Whitelock

@Christine Robertson Thank you for this! I have used Quick Letters before, but for segmenting out contacts at orgs; I had not looked at it from this angle- saving this for the next time I'm planning for a giant mail pull!

Christine Robertson 4

@Jaclyn Whitelock I love the segmentation tool - it has so many applications!