| Surveys Build Mailing Lists |
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| Thursday, 17 July 2008 | |
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Prospect Magazine carred out a survey to rate the "world’s top 100 public intellectuals". A pretty boring subject, but it caught on with newspapers running campaigns to vote for local heroes in Indonesia, Canada, India, Spain, Bulgaria and Turkey. This story about the results on NPR really got my attention with a quote at the end:
How many emails did they get? "Over half a million people voted"! Propsect Magazine is already looking forward to an even bigger harvest of emails: "next time, don’t be surprised to see the Chinese walk the poll". You don't have to play on people's rivalries to harvest a lot of email addresses in a survey. We've long used surveys to build up the newsletter lists for our local tourism sites. People love the chance to vote about something on their doorstep and the businesses featured in the survey feel that they have to turn out the vote. My favorite survey extensions for Joomla are Joosurvey (free) iJoomla Surveys (commercial). Set as favorite Bookmark
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Comments (5)
  written by Barrie North, July 17, 2008
Another trick.... use iContact and make the survey questions custom fields. Then you can follow up with emails based on targeted groups. Always a good idea for your email marketing.....
 written by Cory Webb, July 17, 2008
I really don't like the idea of tricking people into signing up for an e-mail newsletter. I assume you would include in your surveys the option to opt out of any future e-mails.
written by Barrie North, July 17, 2008
If you are tricking people then that's bad practice
1. State your privacy policy 2. Be CAN-SPAM compliant (i.e. unsubscribe mechanism and contact address) 3. Be clear in your offer. I have occasionally offered prizes for survey participation.  written by Ansiklopedi, July 17, 2008
it's a great tip to get more subs but on the other side, i was one that Turks who are voted. i give my email for the poll. if they use my email for the other think (using promotion or news about their company), it will be a SPAM
  written by Steve Burge, July 17, 2008
Hi Cory - we basically let people complete the survey and then have a newsletter box on the final page after they've finished ... its not compulsory but the sign-up % is very good.
Hi Ansiklopedi - thats very true. The newsletter list needs to be very tightly related to what people were interested in initally. Write comment
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If you're serious about getting repeat visitors and building your brand, sending out newsletters is a vital tactic. Sometimes its hard to get started with a subscriber base, but there are tactics that work well - surveys are my favorite.
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