Mars, the maker of M&Ms, Skittles, and other confectionery recently launched a new brand – Fling – its first in 20 years. For now, it’s only sold in California and online at flingchocolate.com.

Fling Chocolate

You may think that it’s just another candy – so what? The interesting thing to notice is its focus on a specific target market with an overt nature of its gender bias. Everything from the outside packaging, choice of color, the typeface of the brand name, the slimness of the chocolate bar inside, the pink wrapper, and all their communications – shouts feminine. Well, doesn’t such an overt display and positioning of a product really drive away other demographics from trying it out? Yes, I think it does. However, that’s exactly what the marketing folks at Fling want to happen. If fact, listen to what Thomas Pinnau, VP of Indulgence for Mars’ snackfood division had to say – “We had lengthy discussions about whether pink would be too feminine but we decided if it’s polarizing, that’s good.”

It’s clear that Mars wants to target this brand at a specific segment but you may think that hey! wouldn’t that approach come with the risk of driving away potential sales. Not necessarily. More and more, even marketers at large brands are moving towards some type of targeted approach (almost niche marketing) rather than mass marketing. The challenge with offline marketing is the lack of an ability to quickly measure the results as well as cost-effectively change the tactics, if warranted. This is where digital marketing approaches such as email marketing becomes more effective.

So, what are the two key takeaways from this example that we can apply to email marketing? – Segmentation & Target Marketing. Just because one has 20,000 subscribers in a list does not effectively translate to the fact that one should just send an email blast of every campaign to everyone in the list. So, what do you do?

1. The first thing you should embark is to learn more about your subscribers by collecting demographic, geographic, and behavioral data. You can gather the first two data types either during opt-in time or by encouraging your subscribers to update their personal profile and the last one using clickthrough information on your site, past purchase details from your database, and responses to your past email campaigns.
2. Once you collect these details, divide your customers into different segments. For better identification, you can even create personas for each of these segments. Try to keep things simple. Do not create too many segments.
3. To begin with, target your campaigns and communications to one or two segments.
4. Test your campaigns using A/B split test and apply dynamic content.
5. Try to offer the content that is related to the subscriber’s past behavior.
6. Measure the results and compare them to your subscriber’s previous responses.
7. Continue to Optimize.
8. Take this to the next level by adding more segments.
9. Monitor, Measure, & Optimize.

I understand that all this could look overwhelming. You need just a combination of marketing strategy, a process to capture data, a good database, an email marketing toolset, and some effort at the beginning. After couple of iterations of using these tactics, you will be able to accomplish several objectives:

1. An increase in your communication relevance to your subscribers or customers
2. A lift in the basic metrics such as open and click rates
3. An increase in your conversions, which will result in
4. A higher revenue and/or lower unsubscribe rates, translating to
5. An increase in deliverability rates

Let us know if you are interested to discuss any of these ideas with us to positively impact your marketing campaigns.