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In a series of articles spread over 12 months, the Pure newsletter breaks down the different aspects of running successful email marketing campaigns. In this article we look at using email marketing to build an accurate profile of your customers.

Why is it important?

Accurate up-to-date information about your customers and potential customers - their likes, needs and motivations - can be worth its weight in gold but gathering it can cost almost as much.

Focus groups, postal surveys and census-takers are expensive, and don't necessarily tell you want you want to know.

Email marketing offers a cost-effective, accurate and non-intrusive way of conducting customer research.

How do I do it?

The important thing is to try to build up a picture of your customers over time. This way your research won't be intrusive.

You can build a useful profile of your customers with methods such as:

• Survey and polls
  Ask one or two questions in a regular newsletter. Less is definitely better than more in terms of numbers of questions and they should be relevant to the customer.
  
  You can also use email to send out larger customer surveys - but these should be few and far between or they will annoy and then get ignored. Generally, once a year is a good interval for large customer surveys.
• Relevant content and special offers
  You can use offers and content within your email which is linked to your website and monitor which links are clicked on.
  
  This will give you information on what interests your users, both in information terms and your product or services. You can send different versions of emails to test different approaches, such as special offers.

How do I get people to respond?

It is not always easy get people to answer questions. It helps to offer an incentive such as entry into a prize draw. The larger the survey is, the larger the prize should be.

Give me an example

Online travel company Expedia often asks questions in their weekly newsletter. For example:

Getting to know you - These great cities are all close to home and well worth a weekend visit - but which is your favourite?: Edinburgh; Dublin; London; Belfast; York

Your opinion counts - Which is your favourite sun destination in Europe? Costa Del Sol; French Riviera; Algarve; Canary Islands; Cyprus; Other:

What should I do with this information?

You can use the information gathered to analyse your customer's preferences and buying trends. This will allow you to better target both your email marketing and your products and services.