Kick-start Your Opt-in E-mail Campaigns: Capture Customers’ Preferences

If your opt-in e-mail marketing campaigns could use a kick-start, try segmenting customer groups and then sending targeted messages based on their preferences, say officials at Responsys, an e-mail service provider based in Redwood City, Calif. They recommend that if you want to effectively communicate with your e-mail customers throughout their buying lifecycles, take the following actions.

1. “Keep the initial opt-in form with required information short and ask [customers] for preferences iteratively,” notes Responsys in its white paper”Making the Most of Each Customer Contact.” Include an optional secondary page on which customers can offer additional data about themselves, including interests, hobbies and how often they want to be contacted by you.

2. In your welcome messages and in all other follow-up communications, give customers the opporunity to update their profiles. Include a link to their profile page, for instance. Also, test putting individual profile questions at the end of your e-mail campaigns. These may prompt customers to “update/augment their profile information over time” notes Responsys.

3. Ask only for customer information you will use to drive marketing campaigns.

4. Be sure the personally identifiable information you collect on your customers and how you use those data match what you outline in your privacy policy. “In this age of identity theft and spam, permission and privacy are key elements in a customer’s decision to have an online relationship with a retailer,” Responsys officials note. “Clearly communicate when and how business partners will have access to your [e-mail] subscriber list. When asking for information, prominently feature a sentence about protecting the recipient’s privacy as well as a link to your privacy policy.”

For a copy of the Responsys white paper “Making the Most of Each Customer Contact,” call (650) 801-7400.