Loyalty and direct marketing services provider Netcentives has added surveying and polling technology to its e-mail marketing solutions, the company said yesterday.
The surveying technology lets marketers send questions via e-mail to individuals who have information missing from their customer profiles, allowing companies to keep information current and to segment their e-mail lists better.
“We send e-mails based off of a database of consumer profiles, so we know consumer by consumer which questions someone has answered and which ones they haven't answered, because a field will be empty if they haven't answered,” said Bruce Sattley, director of product management at Netcentives, San Francisco. “The technology will pick up on those empty fields, and then we can prioritize which one of those fields is more important to our clients.
“The question one consumer gets asked may be very different from the question that another consumer gets asked, even though it comes during the same campaign,” he said.
The polling technology aims to help marketers build communities by allowing them to ask customers a set of questions via e-mail. Unlike the survey technology, the polling technology asks customers the same questions and allows them to see the results of their groups' responses.
Sattley said the polling technology will allow marketers to segment their databases further by creating communities based on customers' polling results.
Netcentives, which has nearly 200 clients, plans to charge its clients an initial undisclosed setup fee, followed by management fees, Sattley said.
