With e-mail now the preferred communication channel for many people, companies are finding it particularly effective for marketing communications with customers. In an attempt to build the allusive one-to-one relationship, every e-mail can be personalized to include content for an individual. E-mails can be simple plain text or include full graphics using html.
Many of the concepts associated with e-mail marketing originate from the direct marketing industry. Complexities with e-mail providers checking for unsolicited e-mail (SPAM) make e-mail marketing a constantly evolving field. This improved SPAM checking technology is ensuring that consumers only receive the messages that they really want to, so it has become even more important for every campaign to be relevant and targeted. The following article draws together key information on growing your database.
Growing Your E-Mail List
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After spending substantial amounts on marketing to get traffic to your site it is essential to try and get your potential customers’ e-mail addresses to ensure that even if they do not complete a purchase now, you can market them and sell them additional products or services later. This e-mail address with site statistics can enable you to push special offers for the items that the customer looked at or added to their basket but did not complete an order for.
Many people will be reluctant to give you their e-mail address for nothing, unless you are a very trusted brand, so incentivizing the collection of an e-mail address will increase your e-mail registrations. An appropriate incentive or aspirational prize can also help to qualify the registrants. See the following examples:
Company                   Example of e-mail registration incentive
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Airline Network         Competition to win a pair of return flights to Europe
 BuyCosmetics.com     3 Months free magazine subscription
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CNN Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Member service for news/sports alerts sent to your e-mail
 Diesel                         ‘Join the Cult’ – 5 star member service
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Maybelline (L’Oreal) Â Competition to win the latest product XXL Intense
 Virgin Wines              Free wine tasting course
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Data Collection
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The ideal scenario is to collect the e-mail address directly from your home page, this will ensure you have the highest number of e-mail address collected. After the collection of the opt-in e-mail address (often called permission marketing) you can redirect to a secondary page and collect additional information like age, sex and postal address. The more information you demand in the first instance the less likely the consumer will be to complete all the fields. If you fail to get the balance right the consumer will either enter incorrect information to move quickly through the process or not bother to finish the process at all. At each point you ask for information, provide an incentive for the consumer.
In the Diesel registration example, you could ‘join the cult’ with an e-mail address, however it was followed up with an e-mail to the consumer explaining they would only get the five star experience (launch parties, fashion shows) once they have registered with full details, including, age, sex, home address, telephone number and the two Diesel stores most frequented.
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