How important is a clean, complete and accurate data inside its own database? This is one of the most frequent questions made by our clients.


When you got effective and profiled contacts, you can concentrate all your marketing effort to get higher and higher response rates from your email marketing campaigns that hopefully will transform into new sales opportunities and trade agreements.

Let’s face it, doesn’t exist a magic wand that will give us right away and without any effort all the data we need, but there are some tricks to speed up and automate the process.

There are at least two ways to build a database:

  1. Buy safe cold lists (like Bancomail’s lists)
  2. Collect personally the customer’s email addresses, leads and prospects.

Each method has its pros and cons, but is the combination of the two procedures that allow better results.

Building autonomously the own database allows the acquisition of very qualified contacts in a long time, instead the use of cold lists, carefully selected by different criteria, allows to contact a very large number of users from which to extract qualified leads.

How to know better your audience?

At the beginning we might be tempted to use complex forms that can explore every habit or interest. This is not a good idea for at least three reasons:

  1. Too many questions, few answers. More fields your form will count, more the compilation rate will drop. No matter how big is the interest to maintain the contact, if filling out requires too much effort or is too invasive, many users will give up the compilation.
  2. Users lie. Don’t tell me that you’ve never fill out a form with a name or a patently false contact just to get a free download. We need to know exactly what information to ask and when.
  3. The love season come and goes. People change, interests and working position as well. No data lasts forever, that’s why every preference should be periodically updated.
    So, how to solve the growing number of information necessary for a proper content marketing activity? A winning choice, connected to marketing objectives, is to collect them over time.

Dynamic content based on user’s behaviour over time

Whether you acquire an email address from a third-party database, as Bancomail, whether it’s obtained directly from a form inserted in your website it’s very possible that you don’t possess an address with too much information.

This lack of information, is solved through a logic progressive profiling which provides that each subscriber’s information to be interviewed and filed in time. In a lead nurturing process, for example, the subscriber’s position, the strategic goal of the year and other information related to the company’s structure are very relevant and can be obtained by downloading an additional material form.

It’s interesting the method that Avid implemented on its own campaigns that allows members to self-modulate the content and to Avid to know exactly the interests of its readers. Other advantage for Avid is that of not having to send more newsletters, but to have a constantly self-updated database and increased always by new details. Actually is sent a single email whose content changes dynamically depending on the user’s preference.

avid-primaconfigurazioneLet’s see how Avid has implemented this approach: the first newsletter received after the opt-in, invites you to customize further ones by choosing the topics of greatest interest. By using masked form already from the email, the user is lead to click links like “Do you want more information regarding music production?” and its preferences are immediately registered.

Using a classification based on the thematic areas, the next email’s content is made to satisfy the player’s requirements.

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To make this kind of approach even more powerful, after the self-explicit profiling, you can start an implicit profiling program that uses every clicked link to convert it into a thematic preference.

These simple tips are easy to implement if they are obtained through professional sending software, allowing an advanced segmentation. It’s different instead using SmartBrief, excellent news publisher for market leaders, which according to a predetermined frequency, ask subscribers to update their preferences. The peculiarity of this practice lies in its behavior: the small survey is supplied only when the user shows interest in a topic by clicking on a link in the message.

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Whatever your practice to segment your readers is, the examples that we choosed today, demonstrates how inspired can be to collect additional information for a simple and non-invasive segmentation.

Keep up the good work!