Use interests
Interests are a great way to group and categorise your contacts. Read more about interests here.
To follow the steps in this article, you need to have set your interests already. Click here to learn how to create an interest.
Use interests in a subscription form
Contacts can subscribe using a subscription form and indicate which communication they are interested in.
After the subscription has been confirmed, your contacts get to their profile page, where they can view all available interests.
Depending on where they have subscribed on your website, you may want to presubscribe them to one or multiple specific interests. To this end, you have the possibility of adding up to five public interests. These will be ticked for your contact by default. Of course, your contact can still customise this in the profile.
Your contacts can adjust their subscription to an interest via the public profile page at all times.
Assign interests at import
If you want to add interests to your contacts using an import, you have to make sure to set up your file correctly beforehand. You can assign both existing and new interests.
Add existing interests
- Create a column in your work folder with the header Interests.
- In the field, sum up the interests you want your contact to have, separated by a comma.
- Import your contacts in the usual way and link the column with the header Interests to the database field Interests. (You can also give your file a different column name, provided that it is recognisable to you.)
Interests are case-sensitive. For correct data import, upper- and lowercase must be copied exactly.
If a contact has unsubscribed from one of the added interests previously, we will skip that interest. All other contact information for the respective email address will be updated.
If an interest in your file does not exist in Flexmail, the data of that row in your file will not be processed. We will inform you about this via the import errors, so that you can adjust this information and import it again.
Add new interests
If there are no interests in your file, you will have the option of assigning an existing interest to all contacts from your file at import. However, you can also create a new interest.
In the process, you can add the following fields about your new interest:
- What will be the name of this interest?
- Visibility of this interest
- What will be the label of this interest?
- Add a description of this interest
Private interests are only included from a Pro subscription.
Update the interests of an existing contact
When you open the contact detail page, you can add interests via the Adjust button next to Interests. You can add interests by selecting a new interest from the drop-down list or just by clicking the desired interest. Here, you can see immediately whether or not it is a public interest.
If the interest does not exist yet, you can also create it directly via the option Add new interest. How to create and manage an interest is described here.
An interest can be deleted easily if you click the check box next to the interest name. Click Save when you are satisfied with the changes.
Create a segment based on interests
A detailed tutorial about how to create a segment is provided here.
Use the following steps to build your segment:
- At Trigger, select Interests.
- At Field, select your desired interest (in our example, this is Accessories).
- At Function, choose one of three options, depending on the contacts you want to add:
- Subscribed
- Not subscribed
- Unsubscribed
Assign interests automatically via Link Tracking
Link Tracking works similarly in our three message builders. The Link Tracking button is always available in the editing mode of your message. Flexmail will analyse your message and make a list of all available link.
In the Link Tracking management, you can rename your link, turn on tracking and Google Analytics. Here, you can also associate each link to one interest. That way each contact will automatically be part of the connected interest once they click on that link.
To assign the interest to your link just use the dropdown to select the interest, then click on Save to apply the changes.
The links themselves and the Link Tracking settings should NOT be changed after you send the campaign. If you change them, the results in the reports would not be correct.
Create a workflow based on interests
You can also create a workflow for contacts with a specific interest. Here, you can learn about the different ways in which you can use interests in workflows.
Click here for a general tutorial about how to create a workflow.
Start block
Let us begin with the Start block. In the Start block, you choose the contacts that are added to your workflow based on the various triggers. To add contacts based on an interest, you open Contacts and select Contacts that are added to an interest. You automatically go to the next step.
There is also the option Contacts unsubscribed from an interest. Use this option when you want to take action immediately because a contact unsubscribes from a specific interest.
On the next screen, you select by which specific interest the workflow will be activated. You can also opt for adding not only new members of an interest but also existing ones. To do so, tick the check box next to Include all contacts that are already subscribed to the interest. Click Save to continue.
Flow actions
With the flow actions, you can add an if/else condition. On the Contacts tab, you can ask whether your contact belongs to one or multiple interests or has unsubscribed from an interest. Based on the reply, contacts will go to the Yes side or the No side of the condition.
Contact actions
Finally, you can also add interests to or delete interests from the workflow. You can set this via the contact actions.
