You may want to let your users decide what information they should receive, and/or you may want to segment your subscribers for your own grouping purposes. It can e.g. be:
- You may want to have only those with the highest possible interest, and who have shown that by clicking certain links in your e-mails in their own segment.
- You may want to separate end-users from resellers and/or business users.
- You may want to be able to customize the information your users should be getting by letting them choose what is their best interest, a little bit like reading a book where you can decide what it will lead to.
We can call this to be able to build decision-trees.
It is quite simple to do this with Otto. You just ask your subscribers in an event in an e-mail what they prefer by providing a choice of one or more links.
Then you just need to attach the e-mail-address and the variables to subscribe the user to the new sequence in order to have your contacts segmented, or in order to send out more customized information to the user.
Here's an example of how an e-mail can look like when you want to let a user who is subscribed to sequence 1 decide what he'll get more information about in the e-mail tomorrow. You will then also need two more sequences, 2 and 3, and if you specifically want him to get that information the next day, you'll have to state that the first event should happen first after 1 day.
In order to not send you useless information, please state which interests you most, and then I can make sure that the information you will get tomorrow is really suited to your interest: I'm most interested in A and click this link: www.{yourdomain}.com/A I'm most interested in B and click this link: www.{yourdomain}.com/B
The reason to include the actual domain in the link (and not just text) is simply that some e-mail browsers, as e.g. Outlook will give you a higher spam-probability score if you have a link without telling in the text where it goes to. They don't care about any extra variables that you pass along though.
The actual links will need to look something like this (with these variables passed along, and the parts in yellow depending on the name of your sequence and Otto-installation):
<a href="{YOUR-OTTO-DOMAIN}/otto/handlers/form_handler.php?a=sub&email=%ct_email%&seq=2&sender=1&ref=%seq_name%">I'm most interested in A and click this link: www.{YOUR-OTTO-DOMAIN}.com/A</a>
Where the variables mean:
- a=sub: Subscribe the user...
- email=%ct_email%: ...with this e-mail...
- seq=2: ...to this sequence id...
- sender=1: ...the id of the Otto-user to send the info...
- ref=%seq_name%: ...and just fyi, the user comes from this sequence.
(Don't forget to add a good redirect page for this sequence that will really take your user to: www.{YOUR-OTTO-DOMAIN}.com/A)
What can you now do with the extra information that you've received from your users?
Well, if you can't spend time with every subscriber since you don't have enough people who can call them, you can make sure that you only need to call the ones that you've segmented like this.
You then make sure that you send a notification e-mail to a sales representative only if a user has clicked one of these links. You do this by simply add a "notification" type of an event to the sequence that the user will be subscribed to after he clicked the link (nr 2 in the case above).
See also this related to web-forms and segmentation:
Intro to webforms:
How do I structure a web-form best
Segment users with your web-form:
Segment your web-site visitors by which form, or what details, they fill in.
When asking for more form-info is right and not:
Get your web-visitors to leave you the right data
Pricing & Order for Otto:
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