Before you can send an email personalized to someone’s interest, you need to know something personal about them. So how do you collect data points about your email marketing list? How do you learn what matters to your audience, so that you can send emails about what they want to hear? Below are 10 suggestions.
Create a preferences center. Use a feature offered by most email service providers to ask contacts to complete a profile with basic information about their email preferences.
Track what customers purchased and use these insights to segment your list. Does your customer buy petite sizes, a monthly service, a specific category of goods? Segment your list into groups based on buyer history.
Group your customers based on if they used promotion codes or coupons in your checkout. These customers may be more responsive to offers.
Classify contacts based on how they joined your email list. Did they sign up on a specific landing page for a certain interest? Did they opt in by downloading a whitepaper? Did they come through a social media page or a banner ad? If you know someone responded to a specific promotion or landing page, mark that on their profile for future segmentation and targeting.
Use Geography. Do you know where the person lives? You have addresses for buyers. You might also have the ability and permission to track browser location. Use geography regional messages. Don’t send an email about snow to someone in Florida. Do invite people to a live event if they live within driving distance.
Add questions to your checkout process. Retailers can ask if a product is a gift. Business services may ask for a purchase order. These insights help with the follow up conversation to your buyers.
Classify when a purchase was made. Is your contact a seasonal holiday buyer? If you sell services with a set lifecycle, you can estimate when the customer needs to buy again.
Run a contest in your customer service department. Ask customer service to collect a few data points with every contact they talk to on the phone. Make it a contest to see who can gather the most information and provide a nice incentive.
Track what contacts browse on your site if your system has that capability and segment your list based on what pages they show interest in.
Track what someone clicks in your emails. Suppose you have two links in your email, one to men’s and one to women’s clothing. Tag contacts based on which link(s) they click.