Beyond the Email Address

By Shannon Coulter

All right, so you've heard how important it is to target your messages, segment your list, and customize your content these days, but how are you supposed to do it when all you have is an email address?

Fortunately, there are a number of ways to find out more about your list members. Before trying any of them, however, take some time to determine which data points are most essential to your goals. Asking for too much information at once can actually work against you, so it's a good idea to figure out what the most actionable data points are and concentrate on those.

Ask Your List Members To Create a Profile

One good strategy to start with: ask your existing list members to create their own user profile. While not all list members will go to the trouble, those who do create one can answer a few brief questions about themselves in the process. Consider whether some of the following would be good questions to ask:

• First and/or last name
• Gender
• Age group
• Location (i.e. city/state, zip code or country)
• Date of birth
• Occupation

Since you're asking for their personal information, consider using the profile feature to give your recipients some control over their account. Some organizations now allow people to choose how often they will receive mailings. This can be a good strategy for those that send a lot of email, or those that offer multiple publications.

Take a Survey

Since people responding to a survey are already expecting to answer questions about their habits and opinions, they generally won't mind answering a few demographic questions as well.

If your survey is about vacation preferences, you might ask your respondents a few questions about their age group or income level. Answers can be used to help you interpret the results, but can also be kept on file as information about the individual recipients.

Usability expert and Lyris hosting client Jakob Nielsen recommends that publishers keep their surveys brief and to the point. "Short surveys are good surveys," he says.

"Ask questions that address only your core needs and skip the subtleties."

Create a More Detailed Sign-Up Form

Here's how Lyris customer Lonely Planet set up the subscription form for their newsletter, The Comet.

Notice that the form is brief, but requires users to provide a country of origin. Lonely Planet's publications are about international travel, so it's reasonable for them to require this information. By doing so, they are able to customize both the content and the offers that appear in The Comet.

(By the way, did you know that Lyris' ListManager makes it quick and easy to create a subscription form like this one? Not sure how to do this? Lyris offers classes so you can take advantage of these features.)

Ask List Members to Update Their Profile

This strategy works particularly well when a web site contains highly original and/or valuable content, such as the extensive searchable database of gourmet recipes on Epicurious.com.

Recently, Epicurious sent its registered users an email requesting that they update their profile. The email contained a personalized link to an update page, where users filled out an extensive questionnaire. Users were motivated to provide the information because they were told that only those who updated their information would retain access to the most popular areas of the site.

Attach Sales Records to Email Addresses

One of the next big challenges for many organizations is to integrate data from many different customer touchpoints: online sales, retail centers, registration databases, etc.

While it usually requires the expertise of IT and/or database professionals to attach these records to a list member's email address, the marketing payoff can be significant. Valuable member information such as purchase history, event registrations, and specific consumer interests can be put directly at your fingertips.

Another benefit of this method is that you can collect valuable demographic data without disturbing the customer. The customer goes about their normal transactions, while the most meaningful data points from these transactions are made readily available to you.

Look for Other Opportunities

While a newsletter sign-up form is one obvious place for gathering data, most organizations have a number of other touchpoints that they can leverage as well. Look at other opportunities to build your subscriber base and gather demographic information in the process:

• Events, trade shows
• Contest registrations
• Online order forms
• Point-of-sale locations

Remember, gathering demographic information is an ongoing process, so don't feel as if you have to find out everything about your list members at once. You can always ask for more information down the road.

Contact us at editor@lyris.com to share your ideas. We may include it in the next issue of Making Mail Work!

Shannon Coulter is a Marketing Manager at Lyris Technologies.