If you want to get enough information from subscribers for ‘marketing intelligence’, but are unsure or nervous about asking too much and putting them off - here are some tips…

Getting enough data to personalise content adequately

The ‘right amount of questions’ really depends on your business strategy. If you’re going for sheer quantity to make the ‘sales funnel’ as wide as possible, then you might only ask for email address and maybe first name if you want to personalise. You may later qualify or filter these subscribers by inviting them to a second form with more detailed questions to go on a ‘warm prospects’ list to whom you may send a different newsletter. If you want to qualify your prospects straight-off, to focus your marketing, then you’ll need to ask more questions.

Useful Information fields to have

Besides email address, you may want postal address if you’re sending postal mail - and make it a ‘required’ field to ensure your visitor can’t leave the form without filling this out. It can also be useful if your subscriber’s email bounces – to send a letter asking them for an address update (and making a sales connection with them).

Phone numbers can be especially important if you need to:

• Call your customers to confirm something,
• Build relationship,
• Qualify them as likely business prospects, or
• Fix email bounces (also an excuse to call and qualify them).

Asking for a visitor’s product or life interests is a great marketing tool for:

• Content customisation, which subscribers love as it gives them control and boosts the relevance factor key to email marketing success, or
• Segmenting your list for different kinds of prospects requiring different marketing approaches or newsletters - which is more effective than ‘one size fits all’ marketing

What are the sensitive or tricky questions that scare people off?

Asking for age can be sensitive, unless you tell visitors why you need to know – a key for tricky questions in general.

Credit Card information, household income and gender can all be a bit personal and turn off your registrant. Expect some bogus information here as there are just too many scams happening online and people are generally afraid.

How many information fields does it take to put people off?

Generally, it pays to limit the number of fields to the minimum you need to get the key information, to avoid excessive ‘friction’ – the term online marketing experts use for things on your web page that deter visitors from signing up or purchasing.

Ensuring the quality and genuineness of your mailing list

To verify subscribers as real people, a CAPTCHA feature can be used on your form, which is made up of distorted letters or numbers that a registrant needs to type into a field like the one shown above. This eliminates unwanted automated scripts or “bots”, saving you time cleaning out your lists to filter out these bogus registrations from potential customers.

Striking the right balance

In short, only ask as many questions as you need to gather required information to personalise emails or segment your list for different kinds of prospects requiring different marketing approaches or newsletters. If you have to ask sensitive questions, ensure you show visitors why you need to know.

At this time of year a lot of businesses send eCards (email versions of Christmas cards) to their clients and prospects. eCards sometimes have the Christmas wishes accompanied with an image of Christmas usually embedded within the email for maximum effect.

One of the reasons businesses use email service providers such as Mobilize Mail is too increase the deliverability rate of their emails. As part of the task of continually monitoring the email marketing space for any changes to spam filters and ISP polices around email we conducted a test to see how the current ISP mail systems deal with embedded images.

The results were not promising. It seems that due to the influx of image embedded spam the major ISP’s in New Zealand and Australia have increased the bounce back of any email containing embedded images. Our tests showed a 30% bounce back of the test eCard we sent to the major ISP’s in New Zealand and Australia. There were some exceptions to the rule however (Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail) who warmly received our test email.

We therefore recommend that our clients who are sending eCards this year to their subscribers use external images. For clients who are engaging Mobilize Mail to create and send their Christmas eCard we are providing two options:

1) Use external images or,

2) Provide in the email message a link to the completed eCard which will be housed within your landing page area of your Mobilize Mail account. The benefit to this approach is that there are more options as to the makeup of the eCard. For example the use of sounds and animation could be used.

Please contact us if you have further questions.