Using mailingmanager has its obvious benefits that I’m sure all of you are aware of.  What we thought we’d do was offer you some tips on how to get more out of the system.  We’re starting off this series with a look at how you can improve your market research using mailingmanager.

This article will concentrate on the subscriber form in mailingmanager to capture the consumers data.  Okay, so you will be limited to asking only a few questions in this form, not due to any limitations on mailingmanager, but you want people to actually sign up!  No-one likes to take forever and a day to actually sign up for something so bare in mind that you will only have a few vital questions to ask them initially, you can get a bit more in-depth once you’ve created an initial segmentation to your users.

What you have to decide is which information is most important to your initial research.  Will you be interested in seeing the geographical spread of your subscribers?  Maybe you want to see how many of your subscribers are local to your business in order to offer pick-up only deals or local in-store promotions to these people without alienating the rest of your list.  How about segmenting by age groups?  Or by purchasing habits? Or by people who have actually purchased something from you and people who are just interested in your product?

As I already mentioned, once they’re into these basic groups, you can start to do some serious profiling of your recipients by sending out further questionnaires to get an idea of what appeals to your customers.  Now don’t be scared to create a lot of mailing lists whilst segmenting your recipients, it will all work in your favour in the end.

How do I do it?

This really is very simple in mailingmanager.  Firstly, you need to create the information you want to collect in the custom fields section of mailingmanager (mailing lists > manage custom fields).  The custom fields will also have to be linked through to a mailing list that you have created, but you will be prompted to do that in the custom fields set up wizard anyway.  Once you have created your custom fields you are ready to create your subscription form.  To do that, just go to website forms >create website form and the preset form is already the subscription form.  Then it’s just a case of following the wizard through the steps and copying and pasting the html coding it creates onto your website.

Though this may be a bit of work in the short-term, this level of attention to your email marketing will work wonders for you in the long-term, and once it’s set up there won’t be any extra work to do, meaning a much more effective campaign for you.  This data can also be transferred to any other marketing activities you may carry out and can be used as a basis for how your whole campaign is shaped.

As ever, if this has inspired you to do something similar by using mailingmanager but you’re a little unsure on how to set it up, don’t be shy.  Just give the office a call or email me personally and I’ll work out how to best do it.

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk