Audience Smash and Grab?

FreeImages.com/Aaron Gardner

Why audience inflation doesn't work 
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Is your marketing team tempted to grab as big an audience as possible for each of their outbound campaigns? Why wouldn’t they? After all they are only measured on number of responses. They just load up that big outbound communications gun and ‘FIRE!’.

Your database of marketable contacts is a precious asset. Even more so if contacts have ‘opted in’ to receive your communications, or expressed their areas of interest through a preference centre.

But the temptation to extend a selection of contacts beyond those that are a relevant target is just too strong for many campaign managers. Perhaps contacts do not have known preferences, in which case ‘just include them anyway’ if they are in the right country or industry. If they don’t respond, then ‘hey ho’, so be it.

We know that inflating the audience beyond a tight segmentation is a poor approach, that it leads to unsubscribes or audience disengagement, and in these days of data subject privacy rights they might even ask to be removed from the database.

The sad thing is that those contacts may be perfect targets for another campaign to which they may well engage, but by failing to protect them you may lose them altogether.

Tight targeting and effective segmentation are key to maintaining the health of your contact database. If you don’t have them already, establish some rules that protect your contacts from audience inflation. ​