Note: The "Profiling" tab in the drop-down menu will only appear if you have a profiling-enabled account.
This chapter explains how you can use LBGIE’s™ profiling system to gather personal information about each of your subscribers, which you can then use to create and send more effective email campaigns.
The term "Profiling Header" refers to the general category of a question you might like to ask your list’s subscribers. Here you will create both these new categories (headers) and any questions or possible answers (all called attributes) that fall under them.
Figure 7‑1
This is the header name. This title will help you to group and organize all relevant profiling information. For example, if you would like to know more about your subscribers' music-buying habits, you could make a header called "Music Buying Habits."
This is the description of the attribute for which you would like subscribers to provide data. Continuing with our example from above, possible descriptions might be "favorite genre," "favorite artist," or "number of CDs purchased this month."
This is the method by which you would like subscribers to provide their data. It could be a text or comment box, into which they could type the information, or it could be a check box or radio button that they could select. If you expect the data to be a number, then set the data type to numeric.
A Note About Radio Buttons: Radio buttons, unlike check boxes, allow only one option to be selected at a time. Therefore, if you would like to create a field that requires that a subscriber choose only one option, you must give each option the radio button data type. For example, if you wanted your subscribers to provide their favorite type of music, you may enter "country," "classical," and "pop" for the descriptions and make each a radio button. However, you can only have one radio button group per form.
You may use this field to set the maximum allowable length for data entered. If the data type is text box, this is the maximum number of characters allowed. For numeric data types, it is how many digits a subscriber may enter. For a comment area, this value represents how many rows to display in the text area. For anything else, this value will be ignored.
This field will determine the order in which attributes will be displayed on the sign-up form. Each attribute in a header must be given a unique position. These values can always be changed at a later time by selecting “Profiling System – Modify Existing Header” from the drop-down menu.
Note: There is no need to enter "email address" into any of the description fields. An area for subscriber email will be automatically added to all profiling forms.
The designing phase of our "Music Buying Habits" header would look like Figure 7-2:
Figure 7‑2
Note: You can only enter five fields at a time, so you will need to enter the first five then click the "Update Information" button. Once the page refreshes, you will be able to enter the next five.
You can see a preview of the final layout at the bottom the Create New Header page, or you can select "Profiling – Preview Profile Layout" from the drop-down menu for a full-page preview. To see an example of a completed form, see Preview Profile Layout, Figure 7-4 later in this chapter.
On this page you will see any profiling headers you have previously created (Figure 7-3).
Figure 7‑3
Click the one to which you would like to make changes. This will take you to the same form you used when creating the header, but all fields will now be filled in with the selected header's data. (Figure 7-2)
You can then add attributes as before. You can also modify an attribute's description or size by typing over the text in its text box.
To delete an attribute, select the check box to its right before clicking on the “Update Information” button.
Use this field to change the order in which the header’s attributes will appear on the sign-up form. You can change the values in this field to modify the order of existing attributes. If you are adding a new attribute, you can insert it between existing attributes by giving each the proper position value.
When you have finished making all desired modifications to a header, click on the "Update Information" button to save your changes.
To delete the header entirely, click the "Delete Header" button at the bottom of the page. You will be asked to confirm your decision before the header will be permanently deleted.
Note: Deleting a header or attribute will also delete all subscriber data associated with that header or attribute.
You can also rearrange the order in which headers will appear on the final sign-up form. Use the drop-down boxes to the right of your existing headers to select a unique position for each. When you click the “Update” button, the page will refresh with the headers listed in their new order. This is now the order in which new subscribers will see the headers when entering their profiling data. You can view how the sign-up form will appear by clicking on the “Preview Layout” button.
Note: The positioning of headers and attributes will determine the sign-up form layout for subscribers who come to LBGIE™ to enter their profiling data. It will also affect how subscribers’ information will appear when you view their data. However, if you plan to have a form on your site that will allow new subscribers to immediately enter their profiling data when joining, you can change the appearance of that sign-up form as you wish. If you use LBGIE’s™ Code Support feature to generate the form’s HTML code, though, it will be given to you based on the position values you supplied.
You can see exactly how the profiling sign-up form will appear to subscribers by selecting "Profiling – Preview Profile Layout" from the drop-down menu. This form will display all existing headers and attributes. However, when creating a sign-up form for your site you may choose to request as much or as little information as you like. This page will display how the form will appear in all other situations.
Figure 7‑4