Focusing on the client or prospect is the main element when you want to promote successful email marketing campaigns. Knowing better the type, interests and needs of your target helps you to create useful messages and promotions to be sent through targeted emails.

For the existing customers is always a good practice to provide a periodic Customer Satisfaction activity where to ask – besides the opinions on the quality of our services / products and tips on how to improve the offer – the constant update of the data through which you can profile them (turnover, number of employees, industry). What to do instead when using cold lists?

Identifying a specific target to which send your email marketing campaigns is the first step. Buying highly profiled and updated email addresses (like those of Bancomail) ensure us that we’re heading in the right direction. However, to allow a more detailed segmentation of the new contacts databases, may be useful to know more about our list of new prospects and their relationship with the type of product and service that we offer.

In this case, using a Permission Marketing strategy doesn’t reveal to be a limitation, but an opportunity to jump right in connection with the companies from which we have just purchased the contact.

But what is Permission Marketing? Is the marketing strategy that aims to achieve the consumer’s permission to communicate with them. This type of communication is the way to get the necessary opt-in for further promotional contents. When you write your first email to the purchased email database, you have the opportunity to present your company and your activity, inviting the recipient to access a page on your website where to confirm its interest in your company and the availability to receive commercial communications from you.

This landing page might be the right place to get that information based on your client’s expectations and needs, without being intrusive. This will allows you to set all the further promotional communications and to segment your database.

Of course, common sense and a collaborative approach with the prospect must be the key for the development of this first, short informative questionnaire. The important thing is to make your client understand that you are not scrutinizing him, but that the questions are useful to him in order to receive interesting proposals (and not for you to take advantage of this commercial information).

What is it, a questioning?

So what is the information that you can hope to get from your prospects, contacted through a Permission Marketing Strategy? You must start from your company’s sector, from what you can offer to your clients and which are their interests.

You may offer them alternative ad-hoc to let you know on which category of products or services offered by your company are more interested in, what are their expectations by addressing to companies like yours, which doubts and questions they have about the activities and products that you are offering to them.

The right balance between the profiling of your contacts and their reluctance to provide information to a company that for the first time is contacting them, is to try to present ourselves, rather than giving the impression of want to “extract” too much information.

Pay attention on your customer’s needs, interested in better and communicative services, that responds to their requirements. In this way you’ll be able to create a profitable and lasting relationship with your contact.

Don’t waste my time

When you create the questionnaire, make sure that the person that will receive it, is not struggling to answer to the questions and can do it in a maximum of three minutes. To foster the understanding and fluency of the compilation, the used language must be clear. Also it’s suggested to offer some clear and distinct precompiled alternatives for the answer, but leaving to the user the possibility to enter a more comprehensive open-ended response.

Even if there are not many questions (always recommended less than 6), to optimize the response rate is always better not to set all of them as mandatory in order to conclude the compilation of the questionnaire. A person may wish to respond to a single question, providing anyway a useful information that would be lost, if this one decide not to complete the compilation.

You’re welcome!

The contact that you’ve purchased within a cold list… is slowly melting! He received your first email submission, he visited your landing page and provided you with some useful information regarding his needs and expectations, which will allows you to create more effective further communication.

Why not to take advantage of this positive first impression with a small and pleasant reward? Based on your offer and the sector in which you operate, you could offer to those who decide to accept to receive commercial communications from you, and especially to those who will be available to fill in the short (we repeat: short!) questionnaire you’ve prepared, a downloadable resource (such as a white paper, a discussion on a topic you have in common) or a discount coupon for their first purchase on your e-commerce.

Being generous with your potential customers is the first step to make them purchase or to establish partnership with your company.