Your Guide to Customer Research for Email Marketing 

“Research. Research. Research.” 

That’s exactly what Nikki Elbaz — the “Queen of Emails” and the email copywriter behind brands like Shopify Plus and Prezi — affirms is the one thing that can make emails conversion-friendly. 

At Mavlers, we couldn’t agree more. It’s the foundation for turning average emails into high-performing ones. 

We had the pleasure of hosting Nikki on the latest episode of our Marketing Insider Series. This is a series where seasoned industry experts share their practical strategies, hard-earned lessons, and fresh perspectives on tackling the most pressing marketing challenges. 

In “Why Your Emails Aren’t Converting,” Nikki uncovered the hidden mistakes sabotaging email performance, covering a range of topics, from acquisition and retention to automation and omnichannel strategy. One theme stood out: her strong belief in the power of customer research.

The data backs her up as well. As per Digiday, 65% of consumers have abandoned a brand after just one instance of poor CX!

So, how should you be doing customer research to stay on the right side of your audience? We’ll get to that—but first, a quick refresher on why customer research matters.

Benefits of customer research in email campaigns

How to do customer research for email Marketing

Data-driven email marketing: The next Step

Field for yield: Customer-centric email marketing

Benefits of customer research in email campaigns

Customer research is a vital component of any successful email marketing strategy, and it provides a wide range of benefits that can significantly improve campaign performance:

1. Uncovering nuanced subscriber motivations and pain points to segment better

Customer research digs deeper than surface-level data, revealing the subtle motivations, challenges, and preferences that drive subscriber behavior. This richer understanding allows marketers to create precise, meaningful segments based on real needs rather than assumptions, resulting in more relevant and personalized email content that resonates with each audience group.

If you want to deepen your understanding of personalization, we recommend exploring our guide on hyper-personalization.

2. Optimized email frequency and timing

By tapping into customer feedback and engagement patterns, you can identify the ideal frequency and timing for your emails. Research helps avoid overwhelming subscribers with too many messages or missing key engagement windows, ultimately improving open rates, reducing unsubscribes, and maintaining a healthy sender reputation.

3. Actionable Voice of Customer (VOC) for copywriting 

Listening to your customers’ own words and experiences provides invaluable insights for crafting authentic, persuasive email copy. Using direct feedback helps tailor subject lines, messaging, and calls-to-action that speak precisely to your audience’s desires and pain points, boosting relevance and response rates.

4. Proactive issue resolution to reduce churn

Customer research highlights common frustrations or barriers that might cause subscribers to disengage or unsubscribe. Addressing these proactively through targeted email content or support outreach helps improve satisfaction and loyalty, reducing churn and increasing lifetime customer value.

5. Increasing conversions & brand Advocacy through targeted referral campaigns

Research methods like NPS surveys and feedback polls identify your most enthusiastic customers—those scoring 9 or 10—who become powerful promoters of your brand. Leveraging their authentic testimonials and referrals in email campaigns can drive conversions, amplifying your reach and credibility through genuine word-of-mouth marketing.

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of research, let’s dive into how to do it, starting with Nikki’s tips followed by a few practical suggestions from our own experts.

How to do customer research for email marketing

To clarify, we’ll be focusing on research that happens after the sign-up stage. We say this upfront because the sign-up process itself does offer valuable insights, and you can use that data to tailor your welcome campaigns. 

Since our goal is to turn every genuinely engaged subscriber into a lifelong brand advocate, we need to stay curious. Here are a few ways to do just that.

1. Ask simple questions directly

As Nikki suggests, it’s best to ease into the process. 

Begin by asking straightforward questions directly.

A plain-text or simple text-based email sent after a purchase can do the job, especially if you disable the no-reply setting to invite responses. A simple outreach such as this one from Hard Jewelry can trigger insightful conversations. 

Source: Inbox

You can begin here and then transition into customer interviews for better email performance, where you can explore deeper motivations, pain points, and emotional drivers.

2. Use Sentiment Scoring

Sentiment scoring, also known as sentiment analysis or opinion mining, is a powerful technique for understanding the emotional tone of customers as they interact with your brand. 

You can get your hands on that data in the following ways: 

• Email Replies: Monitor and collect the direct replies to your marketing emails, especially those that ask for feedback. These can be goldmines of authentic, unfiltered customer opinions.
  
• Online Reviews: Gather reviews from your site, social media, and third-party review sites.
  
• Customer Support Interactions: Transcribe and analyze chats, phone calls, and support tickets to understand common pain points and areas of satisfaction. 

Now, once you have the data, choose an AI-powered sentiment analysis tool. These tools use machine learning and natural language processing to automatically classify text as positive, negative, or neutral. Many marketing platforms and customer experience management software now have this feature built-in. 

This approach complements behavioral insights for email marketing by identifying what truly resonates (or doesn’t) with your audience. You can pick any of these AI tools for sentiment analysis. However, while using these tools, you need to keep a few things in mind:

• Sarcasm and Irony: Tools might misinterpret positive-sounding phrases with negative intent, like “Great, my package is late again!”
  
• Contextual Negation: Simple models can be confused by phrases like “not bad,” misclassifying them as negative because of the word “bad.
  
• Evolving Language: New slang, abbreviations, and emojis, especially on social media, can be misinterpreted by older models.
  
• Biased Training Data: If the model was trained on data from a specific industry, it may perform poorly on others.
  
• Aspect-Based Sentiment: The tool might miss nuanced feedback, such as “The food was great, but the service was terrible,” and just classify it as neutral.

When choosing an AI sentiment analysis tool, you need to select one that’s designed to overcome common blind spots. The most crucial feature to look for is aspect-based sentiment analysis, which can correctly identify different sentiments within a single text. 

To avoid issues with jargon and biased data, pick a tool that allows for customization and training on your own data. For a more nuanced understanding, opt for tools that can detect specific emotions beyond just positive or negative, and that are regularly updated to keep up with evolving language like new slang and emojis.

3. Run surveys, polls for direct feedback

Send out post-purchase or post-interaction surveys via email. 

Try to include open-ended questions like, “How was your recent experience with our customer support?” or “What are your thoughts on our new product?” The qualitative responses from these questions are perfect for sentiment analysis.

For example, this email from Miro gets it just right. 

Source: RGE

For best results, we recommend the following best practices:

• Define Your Objective: Before you create a survey, determine what you want to learn. Are you trying to gauge satisfaction after a purchase? Understand a new feature’s reception? Or simply get a general feel for brand loyalty? Your objective will guide the entire survey design.
  
• Keep it Short and Simple: Respect your subscribers’ time. A long, complex survey is a surefire way to have a low completion rate. A one- or two-question survey that can be answered directly within the email is often the most effective. For more detailed feedback, set a clear expectation for how long it will take. Take a cue from how Sightglass Coffee does it. 

Source: RGE

• Choose the Right Timing: Make sure to send the survey at a relevant moment in the customer journey. 

Timing should align with key touchpoints—such as right after a purchase, post-onboarding, after customer support interactions, or when a user disengages. These moments are when experiences are freshest in the customer’s mind, making their input more accurate and actionable. Avoid sending surveys too early (before value is delivered) or too late (when interest has waned), and always consider context to ensure the survey feels relevant and respectful of the customer’s time.

To learn more about send time optimization (STO), check out our expert-reviewed guide on AI-powered STO. 

4. Graduate to customer interviews for better email performance

In the B2B space, customer interviews are a critical step up from surveys and feedback forms. Interviews offer a deep, qualitative understanding that is essential for B2B. This is especially true because buying cycles are longer, involve multiple stakeholders, and are driven by more complex, business-specific pain points. 

These interviews are key if you’re aiming to master the voice of the customer in email copywriting.

Below are a few tips for conducting B2B customer interviews:

• Target key stakeholders: Interview decision-makers (e.g., CTOs) to gather valuable email preferences, avoiding generic users.
  
• Ask Specific, Email-Focused Questions: Skip vague yes/no queries; instead, probe detailed needs like “What content solves your challenges?” to craft impactful copy and CTAs.
  
• Align Insights with Journey Stages: Organize feedback by customer journey phase (awareness, decision) to build targeted nurture sequences that boost conversions.
  
• Beware Micro-Segmentation Pitfalls: Don’t assume that all decision-makers want the same emails. Use data to tailor role-specific triggers (e.g., CFOs want ROI, IT leads want specs).
  
• Combine Interviews with Behavioral Data: Blend qualitative insights with CRM behavior (opens, visits) to deliver real-time, hyper-personalized emails that increase engagement. 

5. Solicit content ideas

Send an email asking your most engaged customers for ideas for your next blog post, video, or webinar. This not only provides you with great content ideas but makes customers feel like they are part of your brand’s journey. 

For example, check out this email from Des Brown’s newsletter Email Advice in Your Inbox.

Source: Inbox

The sincerity of your request conveys genuine intent and helps build trust with your audience. When asking customers for content ideas, consider these foundational tips to get started:

• Segment your audience: Target your most active subscribers, those who open, click, or engage with your content regularly.
  
• Keep the ask simple: Use a clear, single CTA like “Reply with one topic you’d love us to cover next.”
  
• Make it personal: Acknowledge their past engagement and thank them for being part of your community.
  
• Offer a small incentive (optional): A shoutout, early access, or a discount can increase participation.
  
• Highlight the impact: Let them know how their input will shape your upcoming content. It builds trust and deeper connection.
  
• Follow up and share results: If you use their idea, let them know and feature them if possible. 

This kind of outreach turns content creation into a two-way conversation and can lead to more relevant, high-performing campaigns.

Data-driven email marketing: The next step

Based on the data you’ve gathered from customer research for email marketing, here’s how to convert it into smarter, more data-driven email marketing strategies: 

• If your research shows a lot of positive sentiment or praise for a specific product, use those testimonials and user-generated content in your emails. This adds social proof and authenticity to your campaigns. You can establish a weekly email series focused on testimonials, but be sure to incorporate storytelling elements to keep your subscribers engaged and prevent them from losing interest or skipping these messages.
  
• Use the exact language and challenges you heard in interviews or forums to write your subject lines and emails.
  
• If your research shows that highly engaged subscribers tolerate a higher email frequency, you can segment them into a more active campaign. For less-engaged subscribers, reduce the frequency to avoid annoying them and causing unsubscribes.
  
• If your sentiment analysis reveals a specific area of frustration
  (e.g., shipping times or customer support), create an email that directly addresses that issue. This could be an email with an apology, an explanation, and a plan for how you are working to improve. It shows that you are listening and builds trust.

• Create “We Heard You” campaigns. After launching a new feature or making a change based on customer feedback, send an email to the specific segment that requested it. This shows that you are actively paying attention to customer input and reinforces a positive feedback loop.
  
• If you’ve used an NPS survey, segment your promoters (those who rated 9 or 10). Send them targeted emails that make it easy for them to become advocates, such as a referral program, a request for a testimonial, or a social media share campaign.

These are just a few examples of how you can use research data to enhance your email marketing efforts. The more you listen, the better your emails perform. This applies whether you’re in B2B, SaaS, or planning an e-commerce email strategy using customer data to tailor product recommendations and loyalty incentives.

Field for yield: Customer-centric email marketing 

Questioning whether simply asking makes a difference? Nikki’s Q&A story from one of her episodes on the Email Swipes podcast puts that doubt to rest once and for all. Near the end of our conversation, she described customer research as the natural conclusion of nearly every email marketing discussion. Along the way, she shared the following anecdote:

“This one’s from a podcast episode about Licorice.com. They shared this great story about sending out a customer survey soon after launching—and they were terrified to hit send.

But the feedback they received was phenomenal.

Honestly, it was one of my favorite podcast episodes. The responses were so positive that, although they didn’t name names, one of the wealthiest individuals in the world actually reached out and said, “Hey, I love your product. I’d like to help—can I get involved?”

That’s the kind of amazing feedback you can unlock just by asking.”

In the end, it’s simple: the more you invest in understanding your customers, the more meaningful your emails become. Active, intentional research isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between sending emails to your audience and creating experiences for them. And when your subscribers feel seen and heard, they respond—with clicks, conversions, and loyalty. That’s the heart of customer-centric email marketing. 

So, stay curious, keep asking, and let your customers guide your next great email. 

At Mavlers, we take pride in empowering over 5,000 brands and agencies worldwide with our expertly crafted email marketing services. Our proven strategies drive real results, helping businesses grow, engage their audiences, and maximize ROI. 

If you’re ready to elevate your email marketing but aren’t sure where to start, we invite you to schedule a free, no-obligation 30-minute call with one of our email marketing experts.