With mounds of data points at our fingertips, digital marketers of the 21st century are armed with potential to launch the most innovative and thoughtful campaigns with ease. Boy, has the digital age of the internet changed the way we can glean information about our customers and potential ones. To the extent, that a smart company can seriously survey its customers without ever having to ask them a single question!
Before we dig in on this, let’s first just take a moment to review how companies would survey their fanbase. Back in the pre-pixel days, companies would spend significant efforts trying to get this competitive edge. Say for example, you were in the business of selling ice-cream and you wanted to develop a new flavor. You already had chocolate and vanilla (hence the fictitious CV Ice Cream), and now seemed the perfect time to launch a third flavor (if it’s cold outside today, just imagine a sunny summer beach day!).
Afterall Baskin-Robbins has 31 flavors (actually a whole lot more, but that’s beside the point), so you’re playing catch up to begin with, but the big question is which flavor should you opt for? So you hire a market research firm and the devise a plan to survey 500 would be customers and simply ask: besides chocolate and vanilla, what’s your favorite ice-cream flavor? (a) Butterscotch, (b) Pistachio, or (c) Strawberry.
What Would You Choose?
After a few weeks, the results come back that potential clients are craving some sweet strawberry ice-cream. So, you rebrand yourself as CVS Ice Cream (no relationship to CVS Pharmacy), and the rest is history.
Fast forward to the present day and you can get this information in a fraction of the time without ever posing an obtrusive question mark to a customer. The way to go about this is by keeping tabs and tagging customers what they’re clicking on. And of course, email marketing offers and excellent opportunity to gather such information.
Surveying via Email Marketing
Firstly, an email marketing campaign will get you more or less a consistent amount of traffic. Therefore, if we were going back to CV Ice Cream, we could have an email newsletter that take you to three different landing pages, and based on the results you would easily know which flavor was in higher demand. Or you could also try split testing the campaigns. With a third of the traffic getting to hear about how they’re looking into Butterscotch ice cream, another third getting the ins-and-outs on a Pistachio flavor, and the final lot getting the low down on Strawberry ice-cream, CV Ice Cream would be able to gather some critical inside information and be able to make the proper business decision.
This is just one example of surveying without surveys, but you get the point I’m making: the more you tag, the more you can silo. And the more you silo, the more you can effectively target your audience, empowering you to really build different personas for your brand. But that’s a discussion for another day.
