For customer engagement, e-mail is fast becoming the most powerful channel available to marketers.  Growing penetration of e-mail addresses on our customer databases, the environmental backlash against direct mail, the increasing preference of customers for online dialogue, the exceptional richness of response data from email – just some of the reasons why UK marketers should be exploiting every opportunity to capture addresses and permissions.  Yet I am surprised by the lack of attention and thought that is going into the sign-up process, especially in these recessionary times.

I was recently asked by one of our home shopping clients to review their e-mail sign-up process and make recommendations for improvement.  For inspiration, I read the US DMA’s excellent Retail E-mail Subscription Benchmark Study, published last November, and I discovered several practices that UK e-marketers should be taking note of.  When I tried to anglicise the findings with UK illustrations of the report’s recommendations, in many cases I simply couldn’t find a UK example.  I recommend that you read the report for yourselves – there are dozens of excellent ideas – but here are a few that I found especially compelling.

Get your sign-up above the fold on the home page

Figleaves sign-up box

As the company’s website becomes an increasingly important channel for all sectors, competition for home page real estate is increasing.  Yet as the most likely landing page for new prospects, it is vital to position an e-mail capture element above the fold.  Among UK companies, pureplay etailer Figleaves is demonstrating good practice with a simple e-mail sign-up prominent on the left navigation, immediately below the ‘Bra Finder’ search functionality.  Better still, according to the report, is to have two sign-ups on the home page, perhaps phrased differently.  They cite the US example of Cooking.com, which has no less than three – two of which are promotional ads below the fold, offering the chance to win a trip to ‘America’s Test Kitchen’, which sounds like a cross between Masterchef and the F Word.

The most impressive example I found was from US etailer Spiegel.  The home page recognised me as a new visitor and delivered a pop-up offering the chance to sign up for ‘Private Sale Invites’.

Use a landing page to explain the benefits of sign-up

The report stresses the importance of transparency – being open and clear at the point of sign-up about what consumers can expect to receive, and especially how often.  Victoria’s Secret uses convincing copy on their landing page to ensure sign-up, promising exclusive ‘first to know’ benefits to e-mail recipients and limited-time offers reserved for ‘best customers’.  In the UK, Waterstones’ landing page is impressive, offering ‘news and offers straight to your inbox’, giving visitors the option of signing up for segmented newsletters matching their reading preferences.

Cooking.com's sample newsletters

Another great recommendation from the Benchmark Study that I particularly liked was the idea of showing customers what they could expect – providing a link to a sample e-mail.  Again, Cooking.com does this well, showing two examples of e-mail newsletters.  I couldn’t find a single example of a major UK retailer applying this technique.

The Honeymoon Period

When a consumer’s relationship with a company is still new and fresh, they tend to be more receptive to offers and communications.  Offline, we see this in enhanced response rates to mailings to new customers – that’s why many home shopping companies run ‘nursery programmes’, treating new customers as a separate segment for three to six months.  New customers have a greater propensity to respond to offers, they are more likely to consider recommending a friend, and they are still forming an opinion about where the company sits in their shopping repertoire.  After a while, the relationship becomes established, and their shopping patterns stabilise, in terms of frequency and ranges shopped from.

I call this the ‘honeymoon period’.  This is just as important online, and it manifests itself in terms of e-mail open rates, conversion and online purchase patterns.  First impressions are lasting impressions, and the first e-mail received, often an ‘autoresponder’ e-mail, is an important contact.  The Benchmark Study recommends that etailers use the opportunity to encourage the consumer to ‘whitelist’ the sender address to avoid future communications being intercepted in spam filters.

This is good advice, but I am convinced that retailers should go much further.  Using the communication to open a dialogue with a brand new customer or prospect, introducing them to ranges and giving them reasons to click through straight away exploits the honeymoon effect from day one.

Multi-channel engagement

dabs.com's multi-channel engagement

One other practice noted in the Benchmark Study that caught my eye was the technique used by a growing number of US retailers to engage their customers across more than one channel.  If you have a Facebook or MySpace page, a blog or podcast with an RSS feed, a presence on Twitter, or a YouTube channel, getting customers and prospects to sign-up will never be easier than when they already in ‘sign-up mode’ for your e-mail newsletter.  A good UK example I came across was from the excellent online IT cataloguer, dabs.com, who offer a video podcast.

Amortising the cost of e mail

Unlike most of the channels direct marketers use, the biggest cost in e-mail is the origination and set-up.  E-mail distribution has become so cheap that adding extra volumes of prospect addresses is guaranteed to improve your return on marketing investment.  Most of the techniques referred to in the Retail E-mail Subscription Benchmark Study are cheap and easy to implement.  It is, as our transatlantic colleagues would say, a ‘no-brainer’.

Discover how Red C can improve your e-mail performance… call us on 0161 872 1361 or click here 

Tags: e-mail benchmark study, e-mail best practice, E-mail Marketing, e-mail newsletters, e-mail nursery programmes, e-mail sign-up best practice, growing your e-mail file, multi-channel engagement

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Blog, E-mail Marketing, ecommerce, Email, Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.