---
title: "Audience analysis for CRM and email: how to understand people well enough to send the right message at the right time"
description: "Audience analysis for CRM and email: the three layers to understand, why personas are not enough, and six exercises that turn audience insight into properties in your database."
---

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# Audience analysis for CRM and email: how to understand people well enough to send the right message at the right time

![Picture of Beth O'Malley](https://app.hubspot.com/settings/avatar/2761c9d87ba551994b382ed8415ad538) [Beth O'Malley](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/author/beth-omalley)

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Right message, right person, right time is the most repeated sentence in CRM and the least examined one. Everybody agrees with it. Almost nobody can tell you what they did to make it possible!!

What usually happened is a persona workshop eighteen months ago. Four slides with invented names and stock photography, a job title, an age range, and a short list of pain points somebody in the room guessed at. It went in a deck, the deck went in a folder, and nothing in the CRM changed.

Audience analysis is a different exercise with a different output. Personas describe who somebody is. Audience analysis works out what they are trying to do, how they came to be on your database, what they feel at the moment you reach them, and what you already know that would tell you. It produces properties and segments rather than slides, which is why it belongs in your CRM rather than in a brand document.

 

## What this covers

1. The three layers: the human, your audience, and the market.
2. Why opt-in type and relationship stage are the two most underused fields in any CRM.
3. Persona mapping versus audience analysis, and when personas still earn their place.
4. Six exercises, each with an output that lives in the database.
5. And how to make it operational rather than a document nobody opens.

 

## Before you dig in, why don't you get access to RE:markable

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# The problem

## Why right message, right time keeps failing

The phrase has three parts, and most organisations only have the infrastructure for one of them.

- Right person is a segmentation problem, and it is mostly solved. Everybody can filter a database by job title, sector or purchase history.
- Right time is a signal problem, and it is partly solved. Triggered sends exist in most businesses, usually for baskets, renewals and onboarding.
- Right message is an understanding problem, and it is barely attempted. Which is why the triggered email fires at the correct moment and says the wrong thing. The timing was automated, the content was guessed.

Audience analysis is the work that fills the third gap. Not who they are, which you already know, but what is going on for them, which you have never written down.

 

## Key takeaway:

*A segment tells you who somebody is. A signal tells you when to speak. Neither tells you what to say.*

*The message is the part that needs understanding, and understanding is the part nobody schedules time for.*

![Email health check](https://weareastral.co.uk/hs-fs/hubfs/Email%20health%20check%20(1200%20x%20800%20px)%20(1).png?width=1200&height=800&name=Email%20health%20check%20(1200%20x%20800%20px)%20(1).png)

## Free Email Marketing Health Check

### Audit your entire ecosystem in under 30 minutes

Answer a set of straightforward questions across every area of email marketing and get a personalised score, traffic-light priorities, and clear actions and improvements you can make today.

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# Layer one: The human

Before anything specific to your audience, there is a layer that applies to every person you will ever email. Getting this wrong makes the other two layers irrelevant.

- Nobody goes into their inbox to read your email. They arrive on a task or out of habit, and the thing they are doing in there is triage. Does this need me now, can it wait, can it go.
- Decisions are made on feeling, then justified with logic. In the inbox there is no time for anything else. A feeling decides whether your email is for them, and reasoning arrives afterwards to check the feeling was right.
- Attention is allocated, not captured. People in their inbox are already paying attention, pointed at whatever they came in to do. You cannot grab it, you can only match what they are already looking for.
- And the room is terrible. A phone, one thumb, split attention, somewhere between a meeting and a queue. Everything you write at a desk with full concentration gets read in conditions nothing like that.

Audience analysis that skips this layer produces beautifully targeted emails written for a reader who is sitting down and paying attention, and that reader does not exist.

 

 

# Layer two: Your audience

Layer two is the specific people on your database, and it has three dimensions that most CRMs do not record.

### How they arrived, and what that means

Opt-in type is the most predictive field most businesses do not hold. Somebody who sought you out and subscribed behaves nothing like somebody who ticked a box to get a download, who behaves nothing like somebody added from a list.

- [Intentional opt-ins.](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/intentional-vs-consequential-opt-ins) They chose you. High engagement, high tolerance, slow decay. The people your averages are being propped up by.
- [Consequential opt-ins](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/intentional-vs-consequential-opt-ins). They wanted the thing and you came attached. Engagement starts lower and fades faster, and they need to be shown why to stay.
- And no opt-in at all. Bought, appended or scraped. A different problem, and not an audience.

Blending those three into one average is how businesses conclude that email is underperforming, when in reality one acquisition route is dragging two good ones down.

 

### Where they are in the relationship

Relationships deepen in layers, with both sides giving a little more as trust grows. Social penetration theory described it in 1973 and it maps onto a database better than any persona does.

- Stranger. Knows your name, has given you an address. Needs recognition: this is for me.
- Acquaintance. Recognises you, engages, has told you something about themselves. Needs relief: this helps.
- Trusted. Relies on you, acts, acts repeatedly. Needs safety: I can count on them.
- Advocate. Recommends you to other people. Needs status and hope: I look good for this, and it gets better.

Ask for the next layer before you have earned it and people retreat, which is every fifteen-field form you have ever abandoned. The stage somebody is at should be a property, and it should decide what you ask for next.

 

### How much trust you hold, and whether it is decaying

Somebody joining your list is a conversion in its own right. They let you into the place they do their admin and talk to their boss. Most businesses never count it, then spend it immediately.

- The rate. How many people chose you, as opposed to how many contacts you imported.
- The strength. How they joined. A newsletter sign-up arrives with far more trust than a ticked box, and a bought address arrives with none.
- The decay. Trust fades from the day somebody joins unless something keeps topping it up. Which makes time since last meaningful interaction an audience fact, not just a reporting metric.

[Read more about the conversion to trust here](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/conversion-to-trust-the-email-metric-nobody-is-measuring-and-how-to-improve-it)

 

# Layer three: The market

The layer almost always skipped, because none of it is in your CRM. Your audience exists in a context you did not create and do not control.

- What else they are considering. Your competitors, the in-house alternative, the spreadsheet they are using instead, and doing nothing, which is the option that wins most often.
- What the category has trained them to expect. If every business in your sector sends a discount every Friday, your audience has been trained to wait for Friday. Category conventions are part of your audience's psychology whether you participate in them or not.
- The words they use. Not your internal product names. The phrases people type into a search bar, write in a review, or say to a colleague.
- And what is happening to them right now. Budget cycles, regulation, seasonality, the thing their industry is worried about this quarter. Timing is a market fact as much as a behavioural one.

 

# The distinction

## Persona mapping versus audience analysis

The two get used interchangeably and they are different activities with different outputs.

 

### Persona mapping

- Describes who somebody is. Role, demographics, goals, a name and usually a photograph.
- Is produced once, in a workshop. Often from assumption rather than data, and rarely revisited.
- Outputs a document. Which lives in a brand folder and is read by nobody operational.
- And is static. Marketing Mary does not change when the person she represents downloads a guide or raises a complaint.

### Audience analysis

- Describes what somebody is trying to do. Their situation, their state, what is in the way, and what they need next.
- Is continuous. Fed by behaviour, replies, support tickets and sales conversations, and it changes as people change.
- Outputs properties and segments. Things in the CRM that a workflow can read, rather than a sentence in a slide.
- And is specific to a moment. The same person needs a different message on the day they download something and the day their renewal comes up.

 

## Where personas still earn their place:

*For positioning, brand, product and creative direction, a persona is a useful shared shorthand and worth having.*

*For deciding what an email should say on a Tuesday, it is the wrong tool, because it describes a type of person rather than a person in a situation. Segments describe people, intent tells you what they need right now.*

 

# The exercises

## Six things to run, and the output each one produces

One: the arrival audit

- **What you do.** Take every route somebody can get onto your database and list it. Forms, downloads, events, purchases, imports, integrations, the thing sales does. For each one, write what the person thought they were signing up for.
- **The output.** Opt-in source and opt-in type as properties on every contact, and engagement reported by them. Usually reveals one route quietly poisoning your averages.

Two: the relationship map

- **What you do.** Define what stranger, acquaintance, trusted and advocate mean for your business in observable terms, then work out what proportion of your database sits at each.
- **The output.** A relationship stage property, and a list of what you are allowed to ask for at each stage. Most businesses discover they are asking everybody for everything.

Three: TFDS on a real trigger

- **What you do.** Pick one trigger somebody already fires, a download, an abandoned basket, a renewal date, a quiet spell. Then write out what they are Thinking, Feeling, Doing and Saying at that moment. Before, during and after.
- **Why it works.** It moves you out of marketer mode and into their head before you write a word. The feeling column is where your first line comes from, and there is always more than one feeling present.
- **The output.** A one-page map per trigger, and a rewritten first line for each email that fires from it. Keep it for triggered and intent-led emails rather than broadcasts, because TFDS needs a moment to anchor to and a newsletter does not have one.

**[Read the TFDS guide here](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/designing-email-journeys-using-tfds)**

Four: language harvesting

- **What you do.** Collect how your audience describes the problem in their own words. Support tickets, sales call notes, review sites, community threads, replies to your own emails. Copy the phrases verbatim, do not paraphrase.
- **The output.** A living phrase bank, organised by situation, that your subject lines and first lines are written from. Most of the best email copy I have seen was transcription rather than invention.

Five: the signal inventory

- **What you do.** List every signal you already hold or could capture, sorted into explicit (they told you), behavioural (they showed you), contextual (the moment they are in) and negative (they are telling you not now).
- **The output.** A table of signals against what each one should trigger, including the ones that should trigger silence. Most businesses find they already have far more than they are using.

Six: read your last ten emails as the audience

- **What you do.** Sit with the last ten emails a single contact received from your organisation, in order, including from sales and service. Read them as a sequence, which is how they were experienced.
- **The output.** An uncomfortable list of collisions, repetitions and wrong moments, and the beginnings of a sending hierarchy. The single most effective hour in any audience workshop I run.

# The operational stuff

## Why this is a CRM project, not a marketing document!

Audience analysis fails for one reason more than any other. The findings end up in a presentation instead of in the database, so nothing can act on them.

1. Everything you learn becomes a property or a segment. If it cannot be stored against a contact, a workflow cannot read it and it will not change a single email.
2. Decide the source of truth for each one. When the CRM and the sending platform disagree about somebody’s stage or source, something has to win, and deciding in advance is cheaper than deciding during an incident.
3. Give each property an owner. Unowned fields decay into unreliable fields, and unreliable fields get quietly excluded from decisions until nobody uses any of it.
4. Review it on a cadence. Audiences change. A relationship map built two years ago is a persona by another name.
5. And connect it to the question before every send. Where are they, what are they thinking, what should they feel, would a person send this, and who should never get it. Thirty seconds, and it is the point of all the work above.

 

## Watch out for:

*The analysis that produces a beautiful document and no change to a single workflow. It feels like progress and costs a fortnight.*

*If a piece of audience understanding has not become something your system can read within a week, it was a workshop rather than a project.*

 

# The measurement

## How you know it worked

- Engagement split by opt-in type. The first number that moves, and the one that proves the acquisition work was worth doing.
- Conversion by intent level. Are the emails that respond to a signal outperforming the ones that respond to a calendar?
- Time from signal to action. Understanding the audience should shorten it.
- Movement between relationship stages. How many strangers became acquaintances this quarter. A slower metric and a far better one than list growth.
- And emails per conversion. Which should fall. Understanding your audience means sending less and getting more, every time it is done properly.

 

## A quick win:

*Pick your single highest-volume triggered email and run TFDS on the moment it fires. Twenty minutes, four columns.*

*Then rewrite the first line from the feeling column. You will usually find the existing one was written about your product at a moment when the person was worried about something else entirely.*

## The conclusion

Right message, right person, right time is three separate capabilities, and the message is the one nobody builds. Segmentation gives you the person, signals give you the timing, and only understanding gives you the words.

Start with the human, because everybody on your list is one and the inbox treats them all the same way. Then your audience, which is how they arrived, where they are in the relationship and how much trust you are holding. Then the market, which is everything shaping them that you did not do.

And put all of it in the CRM, because an audience insight that cannot be read by a workflow is a nice sentence in a document nobody opens.

![Workshop](https://weareastral.co.uk/hs-fs/hubfs/Workshop%20%20(3).png?width=2000&name=Workshop%20%20(3).png)

## Bring it to your team

I run audience and CRM workshops built around your data, your signals and your own emails. The six exercises above are roughly a day, and the last one tends to change the most minds.

[Enquire about a workshop →](https://weareastral.co.uk/work-with-beth)

 

### Further reading from The Vault:

- [Show Me Your Last Ten Emails and I Will Tell You Your CRM Level](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/show-me-your-last-ten-emails-and-i-will-tell-you-your-crm-level.-the-five-level-maturity-model-i-use-on-every-audit)
- [Intentional vs Consequential Opt-Ins](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/intentional-vs-consequential-opt-ins)
- [Conversion to Trust: The Metric Nobody Is Measuring](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/conversion-to-trust-the-email-metric-nobody-is-measuring-and-how-to-improve-it)
- [Your Subscribers Do Not Decide With Logic, They Justify With It](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/your-subscribers-do-not-decide-with-logic-they-justify-with-it.-the-emotions-behind-every-email-you-send)
- [Designing Email Journeys Using TFDS](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/designing-email-journeys-using-tfds)
- [Email Exclusions and Sending Hierarchy](https://weareastral.co.uk/thevault/email-exclusions-and-sending-hierarchy.-how-to-decide-which-email-wins-when-three-of-them-could-go)

 

 

## Like this blog? You'll love RE:markable

 RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.

 Subscribe to RE:markable

 

## Email, CRM and HubSpot Support

I help marketers and businesses **globally** improve, design and fix their email, CRM, and HubSpot ecosystems, from strategy through to execution.

**My services include:**

- Email marketing strategy, audits, training, workshops, and consultancy
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If you’re looking for experienced external support (and lots of enjoyment along the way), this is where to start.

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