Building Relationships With Online Surveys
Email marketing vendor silverPOP offers this brief white paper on how to use survey tactics to enhance your email marketing efforts. These tactics can be profitably employed for nonprofit fundraising.
The bottomline is that success at email marketing is all about relevance, relevance, relevance of messaging to the individual prospect.
While pertinent data to drive customized messaging can come directly from a member or donor's previous response behavior (e.g. most recent gift amount, which previous campaign(s) they responded to), further customization>relevance can be driven by donor-expressed preferences or attitudes gathered by simple online surveying.
Says silverPOP …
- Use surveys to gather additional customer info to augment individual customer profiles (starting with very small bits of info).
- Develop meaningful dialogues driven by this information.
- Use surveys to “close the marketing loop” and boost responses.
- Integrate survey responses directly into your email database, so they can readily drive future messaging.
The Agitator notes that asking questions of any kind should presume that you know exactly how you will put the answers to concrete marketing use! Otherwise, don't bother asking.
Roger and Tom