To avoid irrelevant questions, start by defining what knowledge you actually need to personalize your communication.
8. juli 2024
Now let me tell you about Jørgen
Jørgen was a fairly well-behaved boy.
But he plagued everyone with his questioning,
from the moment he woke until he went to bed.
Exactly like Jørgen in the classic children's song from 1938, your subscribers are happy to answer questions – as long as you do not ask too many irrelevant ones, or ask the same thing over and over.
If you want to maximise the response and the return from your email marketing, your mails have to be relevant to the recipients.
To make your mails as relevant as possible, you have to adapt the content to what you know about the recipients.
So you need to define what knowledge is relevant for you to have, and how you intend to collect it.
General knowledge that can be relevant whatever your industry:
Purchase history
Behaviour from previous emails
Recent visit history from your website
If you sell products with a high purchase frequency, so you have plenty of purchase history and behaviour from your recipients, the behavioural data alone can sometimes give you all the knowledge you need to build targeted mails.
If you sell goods with a lower purchase frequency, it will very often be necessary to ask your recipients directly in order to have relevant knowledge to segment on.
Whether your knowledge comes from behaviour or from asking your recipients directly, it is important to distinguish between what has "short-term relevance" and what has "long-term relevance".
Here are some examples of knowledge with long-term relevance if you run a garden centre, say:
House or flat?
"Green fingers" or not?
Lawn or not?
Flower beds or not?
Here are some examples of knowledge with short-term relevance for the same garden centre:
A new lawn in the spring.
A new hedge, a new terrace and so on.
The knowledge you get from your customers with short-term relevance is very valuable – but only if you act on it straight away.
That is why flows following up on specific visits to your website – including abandoned-basket mails – typically produce good sales.
Which answers are you actually going to use?
Before you fire questions off left and right, consider how you will act on the answers you get.
If you are an e-commerce business selling clothes, it is all very well finding out whether your recipient is interested in both womenswear and childrenswear – but only if you can in practice meet that new knowledge with content matching the recipient's answer.
Take a look at your content and consider how best to segment it into relevant categories – then you can ask questions that divide your recipients.
Targeted mails typically increase sales, but they also take time to produce.
Working with segments is a process that never ends. Whether your resources are large or small, it always makes sense to start by uncovering the most obvious segments.
It can be tempting to ask about smaller details to seem thorough and genuinely accommodating, but unless your database of recipients is very large you will hardly have the resources to meet the answers with tailored content for many small segments.
Start with the big ones – build some substance and some experience – and extend with smaller, narrower segments once you know more about your users' behaviour.