When it comes to marketing your products and/or services, it’s important to focus your energy on targeting your “ideal” customer segment. A marketing campaign that targets too wide of a range of users will simply not be as effective as one that targets an audience that is shown to be more interested in what you’re selling and thus, more likely to convert.

Classic segmentation criteria including things like gender, age, etc. are nowadays simply inadequate for effectively reaching those ideal customers, lacking the nuance and sophistication of an AI-powered marketing solution such as Samba, which is able to process much more complex, learned customer behaviors and preferences. Things such as what a customer has bought, what they’ve viewed on the web, what has drawn their interest in an email, and many other indicators are taken into account.

With all of this data, Samba's artificial intelligence is actively creating profiles for each customer, offering them goods that they, and other similar customers, have been targeted to have an interest in, attracting them to make a purchase.

Precise Segmentation vs. Smart Targeting

When creating campaigns in Samba, you have the option for Precise Segmentation, where you manually select your audience and product selection utilizing a variety of filters, or you can let Samba do all of the work, automatically creating optimized target audiences, with its Smart Targeting feature.

Instead of you setting the audience, you select the products you want to offer and Samba’s Smart Targeting evaluates which customers to target based on its algorithms. The biggest advantage of this system is that in most cases it has a much higher success rate, simply because Samba works with a much larger amount of customer variables meaning it can better select customers to send the product offer to.

While this automatic system works best, there are still cases where a marketer or business owner may still want to have direct control over who the products will be displayed to for a variety of reasons.

Working with Relevancy

While creating a Custom Campaign in Samba, you can activate Smart Targeting by choosing it, versus Precise Segmentation, from within the “Customers” section. When you do so, you will be able to see the number of identified customers, those that have the highest probability of purchasing, to whom the campaign will be sent.

If the total number of customers identified is too small, you can use the slider to increase the number of targeted customers. However, it’s important to note that the overall relevancy, one of the main advantages of Samba’s personalization abilities, will suffer. Because of this, it’s advised that you work with the slider only when really necessary.

A Combination of Smart Targeting and Filters

Even when using Smart Targeting, you don't have to leave everything to Samba, but can also filter customer properties at the same time, just like you do with Precise Segmentation.

With the segmentation filter options, or “Additional Conditions”, you have access to a variety of different settings such as filtering by customers who have purchased a certain amount in the last month, those who haven’t bought anything from you in the last year, and many other options.

The main advantage of using these filters is that they can be combined, giving you truly precise control over who is targeted. In addition, Samba allows you to save these filters and reuse them in other campaigns.

However, be careful not to limit the number of targeted customers too much. As mentioned before, you can always view the number of individuals to whom the email will be sent to from the same “Customer” screen as Samba is constantly recalculating everything in real-time.

How to Do It for Yourself

You can also view the process here:

To show you how you can get started, we’ll show you how you would set your Smart Targeting during the creation of a new campaign. First, navigate to Custom campaigns from the main menu and click the “Create campaign” button. Please note, you can do this for an existing campaign by clicking on the “Edit campaign” button of that respective campaign.

From within the campaign page, we will create a new email by clicking the “Add newsletter” button and then select “Smart targeting” from the pop-up window.

Then, click on the “SETTINGS” button.

In the “Base settings”, we can set the basic parameters of the email, such as the subject, preheader text, and general product selection.

At this point, you could leave everything to the artificial intelligence of Samba. But if you want more manual control over which products are used, you have access to various filtering options, including setting a price range, choosing particular brands, and more, under the “Detail settings”.

Once you proceed to the next section of your campaign settings, “Customers”, you’ll have the option to refine the audience. We’ll leave Smart Targeting selected, but can adjust the relevance slider (in general, more customers = less relevance, fewer customers = more relevance) or set up some filters that are beneficial for the campaign.

If you feel you have overdone it with regards to filtering and relevancy, you can return to Samba's default targeting using the “Find optimal audience” button.

Lastly, like with all campaigns, you will proceed to the “Design” section, where you can create a visual template for your email that reflects the campaign, your brand, an event, etc. The built-in Picasso editor gives you tremendous possibilities in terms of creativity and functionality.

Sell Better

As shown above, with Smart Targeting you can quickly and easily create campaigns that are more effective than those that are manually set with just Precise Segmentation, as Samba automatically controls the most important thing - which customers to target.

In the end, you’ll have more time to optimize via customer filters, create more personalized campaigns, refine your email design, or simply sit back and let the orders roll in.