A target audience is the specific group of people a particular campaign, email, or piece of content is built to reach, narrower and more immediate than the broader market segment it's typically drawn from.
A simple answer to what is a target audience worth remembering: it’s defined by the specific goal of one send, not by a general, ongoing description of who the brand serves.
One Level More Specific Than a Market Segment
Target audience vs market segment is a scale relationship worth understanding precisely, since the two get used interchangeably despite sitting at different levels:
- A market segment, covered elsewhere in this glossary, is a broader, more lasting classification of the total addressable market, used across many campaigns over time.
- A target audience is the specific subset identified for one particular message or campaign, drawn from within a market segment but narrower and more immediate.
A skincare brand’s market segment might be women aged 25 to 45 interested in premium personal care. The target audience for one specific email, a re-engagement campaign for lapsed customers, is a much narrower slice of that same broader segment, defined by the specific goal of that one send.
Target Audience Examples
- A market segment: environmentally-conscious shoppers interested in sustainable products.
- A target audience for one campaign: subscribers within that segment who abandoned a cart in the last 48 hours, the specific group a cart recovery email is actually built for.
The market segment stays relatively stable over time. The target audience shifts with every individual campaign’s specific goal.
How to Define Your Target Audience for a Specific Send
How to define your target audience starts with the campaign’s actual goal, not a generic demographic description. A win-back campaign’s target audience is defined by inactivity length. A product launch’s target audience is defined by prior interest in that category. Starting from the goal and working backward to who actually fits it produces a far more precise target audience than starting from a broad demographic description and hoping it’s relevant to this specific send.
Related terms:
Adflipr’s segmentation tools make it possible to define a precise target audience for any individual campaign, built from real purchase and engagement data rather than broad assumptions.
