The Two Questions That Make Every Email and Text Relevant

Most brands spend months trying to infer, from clicks and browsing, what a subscriber actually wants — when they could have simply asked at signup. The data a customer hands you willingly is called zero-party data, and it’s the cheapest relevance you’ll ever buy.

Here’s the problem it solves. A brand new subscriber is a blank slate. You have no purchase history, no behaviour, nothing to personalise against. So the default is to send everyone the same generic welcome and the same catalogue-wide campaigns, and hope. The result is a first impression that feels like a broadcast, at exactly the moment the subscriber is most interested and most easily lost.

Now imagine the signup form asked one or two useful questions instead. What are you shopping for? Who are you buying for? What’s your skin type, your size, your goal? Suddenly the very first email can speak to something real. The welcome series leads with the category they care about. The recommendations make sense. The subscriber feels understood instead of marketed at.

That’s the entire idea: trade a small amount of signup friction for relevance from message one. And it pays off across every channel you run.

On email marketing, zero-party data is what lets your flows and campaigns segment intelligently from the start, instead of waiting months for behaviour to accumulate. A welcome series that already knows what someone wants converts far better than a generic one.

On SMS, where every message costs real money and every irrelevant text risks a permanent opt-out, that relevance is even more valuable. Knowing what a subscriber cares about means you only text them about things they actually want, which is the difference between a text that feels like a service and one that gets you blocked.

The best part is that capturing it can be a growth lever, not a cost. A two-step signup — email or phone first, then a quick preference question — often increases completion, because the second step feels like personalisation rather than an ask. You grow the list and learn about it in the same motion. Done well, you can even capture email and SMS consent together at that moment, so you reach the same person across both channels with the same context.

There’s a discipline to it, of course. Only ask what you’ll actually use. A question you collect and then ignore is just friction with no payoff, and subscribers can tell. Every field on that form should map to a segment, a flow, or a recommendation you’ll genuinely act on.

The pitfall to avoid is asking for everything at once. A signup form that demands a dozen answers kills completion and defeats the purpose. Start with the one or two questions that most change what you’d send, and let the rest come from behaviour over time. Relevance from a single well-chosen question beats a long form nobody finishes.

Done consistently, zero-party data also future-proofs your program. As third-party tracking gets harder to rely on every year, the preferences your customers tell you directly become one of the few durable, privacy-safe signals you fully own.

Most brands are sitting on a first-message opportunity they waste every single day, guessing at preferences their customers would happily have told them. Fixing it is one of the fastest ways to lift early engagement, and it’s the kind of foundational, unglamorous work a retention partner like BMO Media builds in from the start — because relevance, not volume, is what makes owned channels pay.