Four Ways to Entice Offline Customers onto Your E-mail File
How much does it cost to acquire a new customer? Whether $5 or $500, expanding your relationship with an existing customer is always more profitable than acquiring a new one.
How do you expand your business relationship with a customer? You probably are already offering cross-sells and upsells, so what’s next? Increase the channels through which they interact and do business with you. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) found that customers who buy from two channels rather than just one are up to 60% more valuable, while triple-channel buyers are up to 125% more valuable. Furthermore, JupiterResearch determined that by 2011, more than $1 trillion of offline retail sales will be influenced by the online channel, up 56% from 2007.
To get a piece of this action, you need to expand your online customer acquisition efforts now. And the fastest, cheapest, and most effective way to do this is to grow your e-mail list with the best potential buyers: existing offline customers.
It should be a no-brainer to build your e-mail list with your offline customers. Yet according to JupiterResearch, surprisingly few marketers tap obvious offline sources for e-mail addresses (only 36% use stores, events, or catalogs; only 28% use contact centers). Maybe they lack cross-channel integration or think this is difficult–but there are simple, proven ways to accomplish this.
Two tactics to approach with caution
Let’s immediately dispense with the potentially harmful ways, specifically e-append and sweepstakes.
With e-append the service provider takes a list of offline-only customers and purchases their e-mail addresses from various third-party sources. This is an inexact science, difficult and, with the proper checks and controls, costly. You are also likely to get inactive or incorrect addresses that, when mailed, will hurt your e-mail reputation. Further, the low percentage of good matches will belong to customers who did not opt in to your e-mail program, and contacting them via e-mail, while not illegal, is risky for your relationship.
As for sweepstakes, they too are costly to do right, and the respondents may not be your most-qualified long-term customers. Most people consider them a scam, and regulators are all over them. While some benefits can be found in both of these techniques you should approach each with extreme caution and careful planning.
Four tactics to try
On the other hand, there are plenty of good ways to bolster your e-mail list with offline customers. These revolve around capturing e-mail addresses through regular Web, phone, mail, and in-person customer interactions, which according to Forrester Research is the most effective and least expensive way to grow e-mail subscriptions. JupiterResearch adds that such lists, which leverage existing customer relationships and interactions, produce the most satisfying results. Anyone surprised?
Here are four proven ways to entice offline customers to opt into your e-mail program:
1) Make an offer. Everybody likes an incentive. Free shipping and handling is a sure bet. Or offer information and deals that only online customers are entitled to.
2) Show the benefits of participation in your e-mail program. The benefits are speed, ease, and convenience. For instance, customers will learn of special promotions or local events sooner.
3) Leverage a loyalty (frequent customer) program. The goal is to get participants to opt in to your e-mail program for more-relevant and timely communications.
4) Actively invite customers to participate. In-store and contact center requests work well. But you have to ask!
The last is, by far, the cheapest and easiest method. The customer is right there at the cash register or on the phone with customer service. Just ask him if he wants to get news of discounts or event alerts or any incentive you offer via e-mail, and take his name and e-mail address. Most customers will happily give it to you.
Yet this is surprisingly difficult for many companies. When I took my car to one of those quick-lube places I watched the attendant as he clicked through the screens for my transaction and just skipped the one asking for my e-mail address. Why didn’t he ask me? Probably because some people, when asked in the past, grumbled about spam and peppered him with questions he didn’t know the answer to. Also, he must have had no incentive to capture my address. These issues are very easily overcome with little cost – it just takes commitment and a clear plan supported at all levels.
Four best practices
This leads us to some best practices for getting your offline customers to sign up for e-mail:
1) Insist that employees in your other channels offer the e-mail option. Make sure you give provide the staff with short, easy answers to overcome objections such as “I’ll just get spam.” (“No, you will get discounts you can use the next time you come in.”) A countertop sign that explains the benefits of and the promises regarding the use of an e-mail address helps your clerk quickly handle objections. Even better, give your store or contact center managers measurable goals and incentives to collect e-mail addresses, and you will see results skyrocket.
2) Stress information security. Emphasize the security of your systems; assure customers that their e-mail addresses, credit-card data, and personal information are safe and that you will not sell their address to anyone but only use it to send your e-mail messages. Then remind them that they can opt out at anytime.
3) Use the e-mail addresses immediately to ensure that they’re live and valid. Follow up with confirmation/welcome messages, which helps keep bogus addresses off lists while keeping your brand top of mind. And don’t lump new addresses into existing promotional or retention streams; instead develop a strategy that introduces subscribers to your program through a string of welcome e-mail communications that work to build a long-term relationship.
4) Measure to see what works. Use a landing page or a promotion code to track lead sources and results.
With the cost of acquiring customers only going up, it makes a lot of sense to use fewer dollars to move existing offline customers to your online world and then enjoy the increased lifetime value of these deeper relationships. These few easy steps are the right place to start. Now get started before your competitors acquire your favorite customers online.
John Rizzi is president/CEO of e-Dialog, an e-mail services provider based in Lexington, MA.
Other articles by John Rizzi:
Borrow a Page from Your E-mail Playbook
Four Ways to Improve Marketing ROI Through E-mail
