Personalize your customer experience with signup forms

Data privacy changes have already started to take effect. And with tracking technology—better known as cookies—soon becoming a thing of the past, Customer-First Data™ is a more reliable and effective way for brands to give their customers a better experience with personalization at scale.

Customer-First Data is information that comes directly from a current or prospective customer. This data includes information like an email address, phone number or birth date that a website visitor enters into a form. These forms have the power to change a website visitor into an engaged audience and ultimately, a loyal customer.

Here are three steps to using forms to collect useful information from your customers without turning them off.

Three steps create a more personalized customer experience with forms

1. Go beyond the basics with your questions

Test out adding a quick question as early in the customer experience as your welcome popup. This will give you helpful information about your new subscriber that you can use later in the customer journey. Plus, having up to five fields on your signup forms probably won’t hurt conversion, which you can verify by A/B testing any changes you make.

Here are some things you might want to ask about, in addition to getting someone’s email and/or phone number:

• Their birthday
• What products they’re interested in
• Why they’re shopping
• How often they want to purchase your products
• What kinds of emails they want to get

For Helen Rankin, founder of Cheeky Wipes, which offers both baby care and feminine hygiene products, it’s crucial to know what product her customers are interested in.

To solve this problem, she simply asks her customers what product they’re interested in when they sign up for marketing.

2. Dig deeper with multi-step forms

If you want to get more information than a quick question, consider creating a multi-step form to get more details after someone subscribes.

Krakatoa, a men’s underwear brand, worked with Formtoro to create a quiz-like form that covers:

• What product style they prefer
• What aspect of the products matters most
• How many brands they currently own
• When they want to make a purchase

3. Create segments with your customer data

With the valuable customer information you’ve learned in the first two steps, you can serve up messaging that’s more likely to result in a sale. Simply create segments—subsets of your total marketing list—that group customers based on the information they’ve shared.

Depending on what information you got with your forms, you can create segments based on:

• What products they’re interested in
• What aspect of the product is most important to them
• How often they want to hear from your brand

For example, Wilkinson Sword have a simple but effective welcome series that’s segmented by what gender a customer says they’re most interested in when they sign up: female, male, or both. This welcome email yields a purchase rate of 40%—which is nearly 20x the industry average for a welcome series.

Personalization that starts from the get go

A thoughtfully crafted signup form can help your brand create tailored content for your audience in a world that is increasingly becoming hyper-personalized.

Learn how to create and manage a signup form that helps you drive more meaningful, personalized relationships with your customers.