The best way to connect your audience to your brand is to personalize your email campaign. And personalization means first finding out a thing or two about your audience.
That’s why data collection is so important. Your data reveals information about your audience that you can use to target them as customers. The more you know, the better you can communicate.
However, we should warn you that collecting too much data all at once can scare off your audience. If opting into something means filling out more information than a tax return, they’ll go running for the hills instead of engaging.
The good news is, in a time when your first-party data is more important than ever, there’s more than one way to capture data about your audience. In fact, experimenting with different methods gradually grows your customer/prospect profiles without burdening them with long forms. Using various touchpoints also allows you to reach customers with different buying behaviors.
Here are seven different touchpoints to C-O-L-L-E-C-T data from your audience over time:
- Competitions and campaigns: Encouraging participants to “enter and share” is a win-win: The probability of a prize for your customer increases through social sharing, and you gain information from more people as your competition goes viral.
- Onsite forms and surveys: Provide an incentive like an exclusive offer, a product, or relevant content in exchange for an email address and a few pieces of information.
- Leverage commercial partners: Tap into your partners’ lists by securing ads and links in their email newsletters.
- Likes on social networks: Prompt your social media followers to sign up, and then use WordPress and Facebook signup apps to send data back to your email lists.
- Events: Face-to-face meetings with your customers allow you to collect data through event registration information and incentive offers.
- Communication invitations: Invite prospects to sign up for newsletters or email communication with a prominently displayed call-to-action. Later, you can ask subscribers to verify and update their information, or use the onsite behavior of your email subscribers to personalize email.
- Tracking behavioral advertising: Pay attention to the referral websites, browsing preferences, types of ads, and keywords to which your readers respond to gain insight into what motivates them.
With this simple C-O-L-L-E-C-T acronym, you can progressively build the profile of your customers over time – and improve your email marketing results! The key is to always answer the question, “What’s in it for them?” If you’re offering something of value, they’ll be far more likely to exchange some information for it.