Demographic Target Groups in your account

A demographic is an attribute in a contact record (such as gender, job title, or geographical location), and an attribute is associated to a contact during the contact-upload process.

Demographic Target Groups group contact records based on:

• whether there is value in the record for that attribute and
• what that value is.

This single piece of information can then be used to target a message to a select group of contacts who have that value for that attribute (assume targeting a message all Lead Developers).

Demographic Categories

It's important to note that, unlike other Target Groups, you don't really create Demographic Target Groups; the system does. Rather, you create Demographic Categories and assign the appropriate values, from which the system automatically creates associated Demographic Target Groups.

To better understand this, review the following example.

Example - Demographic Target Groups in action

You create a Demographic Category named Gender (this becomes an attribute in your contact records).

• You assign the values Male and Female.

The system automatically creates two Demographic Target Groups:

• Gender : Female
• Gender : Male

Then you add three more values: Prefer to not answer, Martian, Vulcan.

The system automatically creates three more Demographic Target Groups:

• Gender : Martian
• Gender : Prefer to not answer
• Gender : Vulcan

The five Target Groups for the Gender Demographic Category are listed (in the Demographics folder) on the Target Groups page.

Create a Demographic Target Group

1. Access the Admin interface.
2. Navigate to Contacts > Groups.

3. Click Create.
4. Select Demographics from the dropdown and click Create.

5. You'll now create a Demographic Category, which will become its own Target Group. Begin by giving the category a name, which will be displayed when it's on a subscription form.
6. Select one of the following category types:

• Standard - Select this to create your own custom demographic options. Basically, select this for anything besides State and Country.
• State - Select this to auto-populate all of the states.
• Country - Select to auto-populate all of the countries.

7. While adding a default value is optional, doing so will ensure that if you use personalization in your message, and your contact did not fill anything out, there will be a default value used.
8. For Selection Type, define whether contacts can only select a single demographic or multiple.
9. For Display Type, define whether to show the demographics in a drop-down menu or via radio buttons.
10. Click Save to display a new area where you can add or modify your demographics, depending on whether you chose Standard, State, or Country.

• If you chose Standard, click the Add button, enter a demographic option, and click Save. Repeat this process to add as many demographics as you want.
• If you chose State or Country, they'll be listed alphabetically at the bottom of the dialog. You can update the names in the text fields or click a (-) button to remove one.

11. Click Save again at the bottom to create the Demographic Target Group.