About interests
What are interests?
When a customer shows interest in a particular sort of product, promotion, or other content, Flexmail allows you to capture that information and categorise it into a group, so that you can use it to fine-tune your campaigns.
If you are a pet shop owner, for example, interests are a great way to differentiate between the customers, based on the type of pet they have. It is pointless to send a dog food catalogue to a cat owner and vice versa. It would just diminish their interest in the rest of the content you have to offer them.
The interests can be divided into two types, depending on visibility:
Public interests
Public interests are visible to your contacts via the subscription form (opt-in) and via their profile page, which is displayed when they want to adjust their profile or when they unsubscribe.
Private interests
Private interests are only visible to you in your account. These come in handy when you want to divide your contacts into groups without having your contacts adjust them or without making these visible to them.
Attention Private interests are only included from a Pro subscription.
Why use interests in Flexmail?
The ultimate goal of interests is, of course, to understand your contacts better and to be able to send out personalised content. You can do this by including interest groups in a segment and by sending this segment specific campaigns, or by personalising parts of your campaigns with Dynamic Content.
How to use interests in Flexmail?
The concept of interests originates from the need to be able to grab and retain your contacts’ attention and send them the type of content they will really appreciate. By using the interests in various ways, you will understand your audience better and be able to fine-tune your campaigns.
Segments
Sending a message to a segment to which you add the contacts with a specific interest, allows you to focus your campaign on a specific target group. You can also extend your segment with multiple criteria instead of interests exclusively. Interests are a useful building block in creating those segments.
Dynamic Content
Via Dynamic Content, you may decide which content your contacts can view on the basis of their interests. You can even subdivide your target group by adding criteria to your Dynamic Content settings.
Campaigns
During the process of launching a campaign, you will be asked who will receive your message. You may choose the carriers of a particular interest to receive your campaign if you have placed them into a specific segment. Interests are one criterion, and you can use multiple criteria to select the recipients of your campaign.
Workflows
You can create automatic workflows easily on the basis of interests. For example, you can trigger an action that sends a message automatically on the basis of the interest group. The action can be triggered as soon as the contact enters or leaves the interest group. You may also add a contact to or remove a contact from an interest on the basis of another trigger.
Export
You can export all contacts with a specific interest. This partial export of your database will come in handy if you want to analyse the information of contacts with a specific interest manually.
How are interests assigned to contacts?
Ideally, you have your contacts choose their interests themselves. However, there are other ways to assign them an interest.
Subscription form
Every subscription form (opt-in) has a public interest section in which your contacts can indicate their interests themselves. All public interests are displayed in the profile to your contacts by default. When you create your form, you can choose whether you want to subscribe your contacts to one or more of these interests by default. These will be ticked in the profile. Your contacts can still customise these interests on their profile page later on.
Import contacts
When you import a contact into your database, you can add an interest by creating a column in your CSV file with the header ‘Interest’ and by populating this column with the names of the interests, separated by a comma. The names of these interests should be exactly identical to the name in your account in order to be assigned correctly.
When a contact unsubscribes from a specific interest, this interest cannot be assigned to the respective contact any longer. Only a contact can subscribe to the unsubscribed interest again later on.
If you have not added an interest in your file, you can give the entire contact list the same interest in the final step of your import.
Personal edits
At any moment, you can go into the contact database, enter the details of a particular contact, and add an interest to or remove an interest from that contact manually.
Link Tracking
Link Tracking is the best thing about interests. Link Tracking is a step we advise you to go through after creating your message. It shows you a list of all links you included in your message, and you can assign an interest to each one. Afterwards, Flexmail tracks the link clicking behavior of your contacts and adds contacts to a new interest automatically. You can then manage your campaign launches and content visibility based on the classification of your contacts with a particular interest.
Workflows
You can add contacts to or remove contacts from interests through various triggers, such as their interaction with a certain campaign, form, survey, or URL.