Targeted Marketing’s Easy With Custom Fields
When you open up your inbox, what emails are you most attracted to? The ones that aren’t completely relevant to your interests? Probably not. Everyone is much happier receiving personal emails made especially with their interests in mind. As a marketer, you can make sure your emails are desirable by personalizing through custom fields.
Custom fields are options you can add to your sign up form. They allow you to ask for more than just name and email address so you can get to know your subscribers better and customize the messages they get from you.
Two Ways To Customize
Within The Emails
Personalization variables can be dropped into your emails to pull subscriber’s information, such as their name or response to any of the custom fields they filled out on your sign up form. Each subscriber gets the same email but with their own details plugged into the designated areas.
Sending Different Emails
You can send targeted messages to a group of people on your list based on how they filled out the custom fields, or you can use a custom field to assign subscribers to specific lists. This will allow you to send messages most relevant to each individual. Here are some ideas:
- Birthdays – Send subscribers a coupon on the month of their birthday.
- Preferred topics – Have your audience choose which topics they’re most interested in.
- Frequency options – You can set it up so you have daily, weekly and monthly email options.
- Important dates – Help countdown an important life event such as a wedding or baby.
How It Works
By default, your sign up form will ask visitors to enter their name and email address. That doesn’t mean it’s the only information you can collect. Sometimes, in order to send more relevant, targeted emails, you need to know more than the basics. We can help with that.
You can have over 25 custom fields in addition to the standard name and email. These fields can be formatted in one of six different ways:
The default field type, “Text Input” will create a normal text field, exactly like the name and email fields.
“Select box” will create a drop down menu which you can populate with a list of choices that visitors to your site can select.
“Radio” is the counterpart to the drop down menu, producing a radio button display from which subscribers can choose one of several options.
“Check box” will produce a check box next to the label of the field. Note that if you plan to have a “Check all that apply” setup, you will need to create a new field for each check box.
“Text areas” creates an open space for text. This field is best used with more open ended questions which might require a full sentence as an answer.
“Date” will create between one and three select box style drop down menus for day, month and year, allowing a date to be easily collected.
You can also make your custom fields not required, so people can skip over them if they wish.
Targeting messages with custom fields is just one approach you can take. Many other features can make your subscribers sit up and take notice.
