This isn’t a grammar lesson. Unless you’re British, my title, “Audience Is Always Plural,” is simply not true. Audience, a collective noun, is singular: The audience was enthralled by the performance. My point is rather that you should always think in terms of audiences – more than one group of people who receive your communications.

I used to tell my clients that the first two steps in planning any communication were to identify its audience and define its purpose.

I’m older and wiser now. I help clients to identify their audiences. We don’t have one audience (or target market, if you like the more business-oriented language) but many.

This is hardly a new idea. I get more catalogs from Lands’ End than I can count. A couple of Christmases ago, my husband ordered from them too, so now he has his own account. I get Lands’ End Home, Lands’ End Women’s Style, Lands’ End Petite Women with Glasses, and, because they’ve got my number, Lands’ End Overstocks. My husband gets Lands’ End Men. We both get the general seasonal catalogs, generally on the same day. His has two attractive young women on the cover, and mine has a woman closer to my age. Open them up, and they’re identical.

Lands’ End has figured out at least one important difference between us: our gender. OK, they don’t really know that I’m a petite woman with glasses – but they do know that I’m a petite woman, if they look at my order history. If they thought it was cost effective to market specifically to petite women, they would send me that catalog.

And there’s the rub of market segmentation in print: It’s expensive. Even a company like Lands’ End that lives and dies on direct mail can segment only so far. Producing a catalog just for petite women would probably cost more than it would bring in.

Enter email. Email makes it affordable to tailor your message to different audiences. The email service provider I use, like many others, charges a monthly fee based on the size of your list. Once you’ve paid that monthly fee, you can send as many messages as you like to as many – or as few – people as you like. Bang. Instead of sending one email to 10,000 people, you can send one version to 5,000 people who all have something in common, another version to a different set of 1,000 people, and so on – down to a special email you send to your 50 most influential stakeholders, asking them only to forward this message to their colleagues.

A professional association has an annual conference. Direct mail plays a vital part in getting people to sign up for the conference, but, for all but the largest and richest organizations, the “save the date” mailing and the full conference brochure can come in only one version.

However, the association’s email campaigns can and should be tailored to different audiences.

In the professional association I worked with, we sent perhaps 10 different email campaigns in the months leading up to the conference. We divided these emails in many ways. Sometimes we sent one message to association members and a different one to non-members, reminding them that becoming a member would save them hundreds of dollars on conference registration. In another campaign, we might really drill down: When emailing international members, we emphasized the availability of the webcast conference. When emailing students in the association’s field, we emphasized the student discount.

You get the picture.

If you’re in a nonprofit organization, you’re preparing your year-end donor appeal. You probably don’t have the staff or budget to send more than one version of the letter.

But you can send an email follow-up about a week after your letter hits mailboxes, and this email can be customized, at very low cost, in as many ways as you can keep track of. You can try two different messages to the same audience to see which one pulls more support. You can tailor one message to previous donors and another to those who have not previously donated. You should definitely do a special email to faithful donors who give large amounts.

(Those people also got a handwritten note from the executive director, didn’t they?)

You don’t have email addresses? Your database doesn’t allow you to identify your audiences this way? I’ll write about how to address these common problems in future newsletters. The next issue will show you ways to address the needs of varied audiences when you have to use one message to reach them all.