How do you get a customer to open your e-mail and take action? 

Simple:  Show him or her why the information you’re providing is significant, why it matters for his or her business or life.
That DOESN’T mean

• why it’s significant for everyone on the planet,
• why it’s significant for the Internet marketing world, in general,
• why it’s significant for your target market,
• why it’s significant for your customer base, as a whole.

Because, to put it bluntly, Jill Customer doesn’t care about any of those things.  She cares about what will

• make her more money,
• make her life easier,
• solve her problems,
• ease her pain.

She wants information that’s significant to her.

But how do you ensure that your messages will seem significant to your customers?  After all, you can’t write a separate e-mail message to every customer on your list.

The answer is simple: You focus your messages on particular “segments” of your list.  Doing so can produce dramatic results, because you’re targeting your message at groups of people with similar characteristics.

This isn’t difficult at all to do.  Here’s a simple, two-step process:

First, know your customers–through customer surveys.   To make your messages relevant, it’s particularly important to know such characteristics as the age, gender, race/ethnicity, what kinds of products/services they produce, etc.  Customer surveys, done well, provide that information.

Second, segment your list, using the information that customer surveys provide.  That allows you to target your messages to people with particular characteristics.  You might pitch messages differently to men and women, to people with different kinds of products, to people living in particular geographic areas.  You might also think about crafting different messages for your “frequent buyers” than you do for those whom you’ve not yet turned into paying customers.  You simply collect the most important characteristics in your customer surveys.

So now you know what kinds of information to get in your customer surveys.  The next question is, when do you get the information?

You don’t want to turn your opt-in forms into customer surveys, because asking for too much information will discourage prospects from signing up for your list.

Instead, invite them to take a brief customer survey at some point AFTER they opt in (and after you’ve given them some valuable content).  Give them some sort of reward–like a free report–for COMPLETING the customer survey.

In the survey, you can get basic characteristics about your new prospect, find out what prompted him or her to join your list, and assess his or her needs.

Then, you can use that information over and over again, to target your messages in ways that will show specific groups of your customer base why they should open your e-mails and buy your products.

How do we know this works?  We looked at the data.  Here are some statistics:

• In the first 30 days of an e-mail campaign, open rates for e-mails sent to lists that are targeted or “segmented” in the way we described are as much as 20% higher, on average (Marketing Sherpa, 2008).
• Open rates are more than 12% higher on days 60-90 of a campaign(Marketing Sherpa, 2008) .
• In the first 30 days of a campaign, click rates for a campaign that uses segmented lists are double those for non-segmented lists (Marketing Sherpa, 2008).
• Segmenting your list can quadruple conversion rates (Jupiter Research, 2006)

Bottom line, if you want to increase your sales, use customer surveys to know your market.  Customer surveys can provide the data that let you show your prospects why your messages–and your products–are relevant to them.