Using Forms to build a recipient profile

One of the most powerful aspects of email is that it gives organisations the ability to engage in two-way communications with their recipients.

The bad news is that most organisations don’t embrace this opportunity to connect with their clients, pushing content with no opportunity to collect feedback or information. Sure the recipient can reply to the email, but this won’t help you collect all of the information you need from the recipient.

Regular use of Contact Us forms within email will allow your recipients to complete a short form and send questions or comments to you. You could include details such as First Name, Last Name as well as Address details like Suburb and State.

This may not seem like much at the moment, but the more information you gather, the more targeting of recipients you can do. For example, with the Contact Us form, you will soon get a list of contacts from different states. If you have an offer that is only valid for one State, you can target the content into those recipients and exclude the others. This builds relevance of content as well as recipient trust.

You will be able to increase the use of forms by running surveys and invitations to events, all of which will collect data about your recipients. The more data you are able to collect, the better the targeting and relevance of the emails.

When using forms, always remember that privacy is important to recipients. Add links to your privacy policy at every point that you collect data and don’t abuse your recipients trust. If there are hints that you are onselling data or exploiting this trust, don’t expect your recipients to trust you in the future.

You may also look to incorporating an API into your Campaign Master solution so that the data you collect will then populate your CRM. Please contact us for information.