- Okay, hi everyone. I think we'll make a start as people are still joining. Well, good morning and good afternoon. We're absolutely delighted to welcome so many Spektrix users from throughout the US, Canada, and Ireland and the UK joining us today for the first Spektrix event of 2022. Welcome one and all. As a brief introduction, I'm Matt. I'm based in Manchester in the UK. As part of my role at Spektrix, I'm constantly looking for opportunities to make sure we're meeting the needs of our clients and supporting the wider sector by producing events like this one today, the third webinar of our Spektrix Spotlight sessions.
- And I am Sarah and I'm also based in Manchester in the UK and work as a support and training consultant. And I focus on helping our clients get the very best out of the system and their data, from day-to-day support to working on more in-depth projects with your teams.
- So today's webinar will last up to a maximum of 30 minutes. As this is such a jammed pack session, we won't be having a Q&A, but we'll run through the best way for you to get answers to any follow-up questions you may have. As ever, we are recording today's session, and we will be sending you the video, along with the links to the articles and resources covered in today's presentation. So, you don't have to worry about taking any notes. You can just sit back and enjoy the ride. And just to let you know, we have live captioning available, which you can turn on and off using the CC button at the bottom of your screen. So, as I just mentioned, we'll be sending you all of the relevant links, but you can always cut out the middle person and head directly to the Support Center at any time of day or night for guidance on how to implement any of the tools and features we are covering today. As a reminder, the website address for the Support Center is support.spektrix.com. So, today, we're focusing on the subject of segmentation, which in a nutshell is the art and science of grouping people in your database based on similar behaviors in order to create personalized, relevant communications that speak to your customer's specific needs and interests. It's also an essential tool for accurate data analysis. Segmentation is undeniably effective. The 2019 Spektrix Insights Report found that highly segmented emails were opened 56% more often, and clicked through more than twice as often as emails sent to broader segments. So, the agenda for today. Well, we'll start by taking a look at the fundamentals of customer list logic, which is the bedrock of any successful segmentation model. Sarah will then take you through some choice segmentation examples, demonstrating the flexibility of the Spektrix tool and providing advice on how to better understand your audiences. And we'll end with some tips and tricks based on frequently asked questions. So, to kick us off, let's start with an overview of customer list logic in the Spektrix, and more specifically the AND, OR and NOT rules, the three key ingredients for successful segmentation. For anyone unfamiliar with these concepts, a customer list allows you to extract individuals and organizations from your Spektrix database, based on the specific criteria you have set using segments. Once you have created the list, there are multiple actions you can perform against those customers, such as sending emails, mailings and invites, running reports, applying tags, and much more. So, there are essentially three golden rules for customer list logic, which are, when adding an AND segment, an AND will always reduce the number of eligible people. When adding an OR segment, an OR will always increase the number of eligible people. As for the NOT rule, NOT is the opposite of the segment you have created. And these same rules apply whether you are working with customer lists, reports, tags, or customer eligibility. So, let's take a look at each of these more closely using the Customer List Builder. So, we're gonna start with the AND rule. So in this example, we have initially segmented on all customers in our system who have booked for the "War of the Worlds," and the system returns 11 customers that match that criteria. If we now introduce another segment to look for all customers who have booked for the event, and also have access requirements. We can see that the number of customers in this list has now reduced from 11 to 3. This is because for customers to pass this gateway, they must have booked for the event and be an access customer. Any other combination will be excluded. So the AND rule will always reduce the number of eligible people. Looking at the OR rule now. Again, let's start with that initial list of 11 customers who have booked for the "War of the Worlds." If we now bring in that additional segment to identify customers who have either booked for the event or are classified as an access customer, the number of people who match that criteria increases from 11 to 14, because we're widening the door of eligibility. For customers to pass through this gateway, they need to be either a booker of the event or an access customer. They can still have both, but they must match at least one of this criteria set to get through. So, the OR rule will always add to the number of eligible people. Now onto the NOT rule. Again, starting with that initial list of 11 bookers, if we were to make this segment a NOT by ticking that to NOT box in the bottom left hand corner, this will return the opposite of the initial segment. So, it reverses the logic to pull through everything but. So, for customers to pass through this gateway, they just need to not have already booked for this event. And now for a top tip for when you are creating segments in general, but especially for when you might be using the NOT rule, and that is to always use the true form when setting up your segments. For example, if you wanted to identify all customers on your system without an email address, simply use the true or positive Has Email Address metric upon setup, including a clear and accurate naming convention, so your teams know exactly what that segment does. Then add your segment to your customer list or tag and simply tick the Not box. By setting up in this way, you'll have a clearly labeled segment that can be used for multiple lists and processes across your entire organization. So, you can, of course, create your segments the opposite way around by leaving this box unticked in the initial setup phase. However, the naming convention can be quite confusing if you wanted to use the NOT rule at any point. For example, NOT doesn't have an email address. So, where possible, use the true form when setting up your segments. So, there you have it, the three golden rules for the AND, OR and NOT logic, plus a top tip. I'll now hand over to Sarah who's gonna take you through some innovative segment examples.
- Thank you very much, Matt. So, now we're going to run through some great examples of how you can easily segment your audience using our customer list functionality, as well as some real life campaign examples of how this can all work out in the wild. One of the most popular ways to segment your audiences is based on their loyalty. Loyalty, of course, is a multifaceted term and often depends on how you as an organization measure this. For example, this may be based on frequency of attendance, so how many times your customers come to visit you. Donations, so how often people donate. Or how people interact with your mailings. For this example, however, we are going to focus on attendance. Using the powerful segmentation tools in Spektrix, you can begin to look at two different strands of loyalty, regular visitors and lapsed bookers. These two strands are incredibly important, and the way in which you communicate with these two groups should be different with clear aims in mind. For example, what do you want these customers to do? So you want them to book more tickets, become a member or donate. There are many options here, so let's take a look at some. In the example we have here on the screen, we have used a booking segment to focus on repeat bookers who have booked more than three times in the last year. We have created this using a booking segment to look at all events which happened in the last year, and then specified in the booking statistics page that we only want the segment to apply to customers who've attended more than three events. You may want to consider targeting your regular bookers to ask them to become members or donors, or you might want to look to reward them for their loyalty with a free drink on arrival or access to a presale. The opportunities with this segment can be quite endless. And then moving on to the flip side of loyalty. In this example, we have identified lapsed bookers using a purchasing segments. This purchasing segments looks at customers who have booked a ticket in the last 18 months, and then use the NOT logic to ask the customer list to look only at those customers who haven't purchased a ticket in the last 18 months. Remembering here Matt's top tip of always using the true form when creating your segments. The way you engage your lapsed or less frequent bookers is really important. These customers aren't reacting to your usual content but are still opted in, so it's a perfect type, a perfect opportunity to reengage them. This doesn't have to be through discounts and offers, but can be through carefully tailoring your content to appeal to lapsed customers. Focus on the genre they attended last, the time of year that they last booked, or the amount that they spent, and use this intel to create enticing campaigns specific to a customer group. And now looking at an example of this, Tyneside Cinema, who are based in the North East of England segment their audience based on regular bookers who are not currently members, and then target them to make them aware of what they're missing out on by not being a part of their membership scheme. So here you can see their customer list, which is identifying those regular bookers who are not yet members. And then here, we can see the corresponding campaign upselling all the fantastic benefits to that specific audience group. A top tip around loyalty is to take a look at a customer list to see the percentage of your bookers who are regular visitors, as well as those who do not visit as often. Does this data match industry averages? And could the split warrant a change in your marketing strategy to distinctly target to these two groups? If you would like some further information around benchmarking and industry data, we would very much recommend reaching out to your peers and taking a look at our 2019 Spektrix Insights Report, which we will share with you along with other resources after this session. Whilst looking into customer loyalty, it is important to mention the change in face of this in recent times, as it may no longer be possible to purely judge a customer's loyalty based on how many times and when they have attended an event. This means it's important to look at other ways of measuring this, and some of these may be to look at how customers have interacted with your mailings and communications, especially during periods of closure. Have a look at customers who have donated throughout the pandemic, and again, specifically when you have been closed. And finally, which customers have opted for credit in place of a refund when events have been canceled. All of these points will give you powerful insights into your customer's loyalty, aside from purely attendance. And another powerful use of segmentation when investigating your customer's sentiment towards you is to look into customer confidence based on how far in advance for your events they book. This extremely useful information can be accessed by creating segments. In this example, we have booking segments within your customer lists, and then running the customer list through a customer behavior analysis report. This information provides insights into another way your customers may show their loyalty, this being through their confidence in booking far ahead of time. Equally, you can use reports such as this to look into the behavior of your customers based on the different strands of program they attend to see how different customer groups behave, or focus on customer booking behavior year on year. This data can then inform how and when you market your events. Now, moving on to how to unlock customer potential based on their booking habits. So often, your customer's behavior can be the perfect place to look for opportunities of where to direct them next. For example, do you have customers who are spending big and often but not donating? Or do you have regular donors who aren't yet members? By taking the time to segment and target these customer groups, you can channel their natural customer development in the direction you want. In this example, we're going to look at two different segments that can be used in one customer list, or individually to target your potential donors, or indeed members based on two different metrics, value of bookings and number of bookings. In this example, I'm going to be using the donor terminology, but these rules can be applied to prospecting members also. So, let's take a closer look at how we have built these two segments. We have a customer segment looking at individuals with an average spend per order. In this example, we're only interested in the individuals who have an average spend per order over 100 pounds. And we also have a booking segment which looks at customers who have attended events which have taken place in the past year, and then specified in the statistics that we only want to look at customers who have booked 10 plus times. So now let's take a look at these segments in our list. So here, we have our two audience segments. We have our individuals who have an average spend per order of over 100 pounds in our customer segments, and then we also have our customers in our booking segments who have booked over 10 times for events which have taken place in the last 12 months. Using segments such as these means that you have a pretty high chance of converting these customers into donors on the information that we can already see about their booking habits. Now, let's take a look at another example of how you can segment your audience based on their behavior. Mercury Theater, who are based in the East of England use segmentation to not only target prospective donors, but also tailor their ask around their customer's loyalty. For example, here, they have a fundraising campaign to current bookers where the message is tailored to them being a recent booker, and the corresponding ask which is sent to lapsed bookers, which acknowledges that they've not visited recently. And then finally, they have a campaign to customers who have visited and have donated recently, acknowledging their donation, as well as providing the fundraising information. Each of these is a fantastic example of how you can use customer segments to tailor your communication and fundraising asks to increase effectiveness. And finally, a top tip here is to take a closer look at your regular bookers based on value of spend and number of bookings. This will give you a group of customers who are primed to be targeted as prospective donors or members, based on their booking behavior. Next, we're going to take a look at segmenting your customers based on their genre preference. By segmenting your audience based on the genres that they have booked for, you can ensure that your marketing is as relevant as possible, as you can target customers with events that they've already proven that they're interested in. This can lead to an increased ROI and lower mailing costs, which is a real win-win situation. You can identify specific genres or program strands within Spektrix easily. And if you'd like any advice on how best to get this information set up and reportable within the system, then please do reach out to support and we will be more than happy to help. In order to segment on genre, you first need to identify your genre in a booking segment. In this example, our segment is looking at customers who have booked for comedy events. And in this example, we have identified our comedy events using an events attribute. For our next example, we're going to take a look at Uckfield Picture House in Sussex in England. And here, we can take a look at how they've used segmentation by genre to target specific audiences with events which they know from experience that they will be interested in. So here, we have a booking segment, which is looking at customers who have booked for a specific genre, and in this example, that is environmental films. And then you can see the targeted campaign which goes alongside it. This approach can be particularly useful when a niche event is happening, or you have a returning genre with a more specific audience type than your usual attendees. Again, this is a great example of how you can cut down on email sends, increase ROI, and tailor your comms using effective segmentation. You may also want to use genre segmentation to highlight customers who only ever seem to attend one strand of your program and then target them to try and get them to attend something new. You can identify these bookers using something like the booking segment shown in this example. One is a segment looking at drama bookers, whilst the other includes all other genres and is using the NOT logic to ensure that the customer list is looking at drama bookers who haven't booked for any other genre. Working with these segments to open up audiences to new events can help you understand how your audience views certain parts of your program. For example, will they book for things if they're made aware of them? Or is it never going to be something that will appeal to them? You may want to measure and report on the uptick in bookings from using segments such as this to see how successful your endeavor can be. And another top tip here when looking at customer bookings based on genre is to run a customer list based on one genre, and then take a look at running it through a report, such as an event sales report, or a customer behavior analysis. And this will give you insight into any genre crossover, which can help inform your campaigns and provide insightful data on your customer base and their interests. And linking out from genre, it's now time to take a look at segmenting and unlocking data around new customers who have attended streamed events. So, streaming audiences are a perfect example of how your database may have changed in the past couple of years. And we're gonna take a look at how to best identify these audiences and communicate with them effectively. You may have seen an influx in new customers who have accessed your programs in different ways, more specifically attended online streamed events. In this slide, you can see some ways you may want to use segmentation to identify these audiences. Firstly, you can identify your streaming events using event attributes, and you can either just use this one segment to look at your streaming bookers and learn a bit more about them, or you can include another booking segment similar to what we looked at in the genre example to exclude all other event types. So you're effectively creating a list of customers who have only attended online events from your program. This is a really rich database of customers for you to tap into, and engage with them differently to your normal audiences. Some things which you might want to consider when you are looking at your streaming customers are, have they been converted into a live in-person event booker yet? Are there now customers on your database who live extremely far away, potentially even in another country? And should your marketing, should you be marketing your program differently to these people based on that intel? And finally, what percentage of your audience signed up to purchase a streaming ticket specifically? Take a look at who these people are, and maybe do some investigation into whether they are a different demographic or are outside of your usual audience makeup. Each of these things can help inform how you market these new customers and ensure that you're making the most of this new audience by catering to them effectively. And now, I will pass back over to Matt.
- Thank you, Sarah. So, we're now going to look at some segmentation dos and don'ts and answer some frequently asked questions along the way. So first off is when to use global segments and when to use local segments. So, these appear on the left hand column of your Customer List Builder with global segments sitting at the top and local segments at the bottom. Essentially, global segments should be used for anything you and your teams are likely to want to use time and time again. So things such as contact preferences, staff members, who your big spenders are. Global segments are available in all customer lists and any changes made to them will affect all lists they are attached to. Whereas local segments are unique to the customer list you are working on, and should contain segments that are relevant to that specific job. For example, identifying people who donated 10 or more pounds yesterday in order to send them a thank you email. Setting up the correct segment type will increase efficiencies across your entire organization by preventing duplication of work whilst aligning multiple uses of the same core segments. So for example, your development team could use a top spenders global segments in conjunction with anyone who isn't currently a member and anyone who hasn't previously donated and add them to a campaign pipeline as a potential prospect. The marketing team could use the same top spender segment in conjunction with those who clicked on the More Info link in a recent mailing, but haven't yet booked for the new season, and then enter them into an automated dotdigital program. And the box office team could use the same segment again to identify when one of these top spenders are visiting and to automatically flag this information to front of house teams who might want to give them a very warm welcome, or inform them of additional packages or add-ons that may enhance the overall visitor experience. The next tip is to avoid using the same customer list for multiple processes. So for example, you're building a list to send a thank you email to a specific group of patrons. The email goes out immediately, and now you need to send another email to a different cohort. But instead of creating a new list, you decide to edit the current one and build your new segment from there. Now, this could actually result in customers receiving the wrong email if the synchronization to dotdigital hasn't finished processing the first request. So, in order to prevent this, always be sure to use a new customer list for a new job. And finally, it's a quickie, but an important one, and that's to always update the count on your customer lists before choosing a next step. So essentially, make sure you click on this before you click on this. The counter resets each time you add or change a segment. So, by ensuring that you update count as a final check, it could help to flag any anomalies with your segmentation should the number in the count not match your expectations. So, whenever you finish setting up your segments, click that count.
- Thank you again, Matt. So, what else? Well, we've barely scratched the surface of the possibilities of segmentation. So, we'd like to draw your attention to the supplementary resources which we will be sending to you in our follow-up email. Specifically, our Building Blocks for Reopening Guide, which contains a whole section dedicated to essential segmentation models, including a very helpful segmentation worksheet which will help you get set up. We'll also be sending you a link to a recording of last year's Fundraise like a Marketer webinar from November, which was part of our Philanthropy Series of events. The session contains even more practical and innovative segmentation ideas and suggestions that are relevant to all teams and organizations. So, that one is well worth a watch if you haven't seen it already. And just to wrap us up and cover our key takeaways for this session. So they are to rethink and readjust. Your segmentation tools are future-proof and can be adapted in a multitude of ways to suit the needs of an ever-changing landscape. Don't rest on your laurels, challenge your assumptions and change your strategies. Segment smartly. By implementing a best practice approach to segmentation, you can increase efficiencies across the entire organization and communicate with the right person at the right time. And unify to diversify. What do you want your customers, patrons, audiences and donors to do? Identify your aims across your entire organization and segment accordingly. And just before we all depart today, I'd like to ask for your help when you leave this webinar. There will be a link in your window to an incredibly brief two question survey, and it will be of huge value to us as we evaluate and plan future events for you, so please do take a moment to leave your feedback for us today as well as any suggestions or ideas for topics that you would like to see us cover. And on behalf of myself and Matt, I'd like to say thank you so much for joining us today, and we hope to see you all again very, very soon.
April 22-25, 2026
