Capturing Customer Emails
How to ensure your customers are opting in, and stay in.
Selling via email marketing
Email marketing is quickly becoming one of the most popular forms of digital marketing, but what are you doing to ensure you’ve got a receptive list of potential customers ready to receive your next send out?
While the emails you send play a huge part in keeping those names on your lists, it’s also important to ensure you’re doing enough to earn the sign-ups! Promotions, giveaways and competitions all cost money, but in the long run, they can be low-cost routes into growing your audience and increasing your reach.
The great thing about email marketing is that unlike some forms of Pay per Click advertising, you know you're advertising your company and products to customers who have voluntarily signed up for your newsletter. That means you have a captive audience of interested people, which you can contact through a relatively cheap medium. Maximising your audience is an important step towards making the most of email marketing.
Email marketing with IXO Commerce
Email marketing is an essential part of 21st century retail. Are your business systems helping or hindering your efforts?
What are you doing to grow your list?
Where is your sign-up field situated? For best possible visibility, somewhere out of the footer would be the ideal. This could be under the homepage banner, just above the footer or even in the main header itself.
It's a little intrusive, but if you want to guarantee that your customers see your newsletter, a pop up is the way to go. We don't recommend these are always active, but they are useful for when running promotions to engage with new subscribers. If you're looking for a less intrusive alternative, having the pop up appear after a few clicks or after 30 seconds (and so further into the user journey), can be a less jarring experience.
Remember; offering a sign-up sweetener could sway new visitors to join.
But it doesn't stop there! Use your website as your main tool in driving more customers to sign up by offering them variety. Separating out your mailing list into segments will make your marketing more targeted than ever.
By showing new lists to your customers, it gives them the opportunity to hear from you relating to specific departments/topics, ones in which they might have a keen interest. This is a fantastic way to get to know your customers. Lack of choice could have been what’s stopped them from signing up so far.
Are you giving customers any insight into what they can expect from your marketing? A sign-up form alone will suffice, but why not drop in some additional information to this page about the kind of campaigns you run and how often they can expect to hear from you. With it being harder for consumers to connect with you now, it’s important to give them extra incentive.
But no one seems to sign up for my newsletter - how can I persuade them?
Incentivisation
So you're already doing all of that? No problem! There are several low cost, simple solutions to growing your list.
Offer discounts to people that sign up - Our powerful system gives you the tools to create a variety of offers, from fixed price and percentage discounts to multi buy savings. They can easily be linked to products, categories, brands or customers! Include the promo code in your newsletter sign up to encourage newcomers.
Run competitions! Zone1 has a competitions feature and It works exactly as you would expect. It takes the customer to a page where they can enter a contest with the prospect of winning a prize. When completed, a customer’s entry is sent to the enquiry email recipient and you get a new sign up! You can promote your competitions with direct links included in news items on the site or by sending newsletters.
So, you’ve built a strong list, now what?
Since the introduction of GDPR laws, it’s crucial that your website is compliant with the new requirements. It’s now essential that you can prove each person on your mailing list has actively opted to be there, be that from last week or last year. This is where third party email marketing software such as MailChimp can make this easy to manage with double opt-in emails and pop-up forms, but if you’re not familiar with this platform, simply adjusting the wording on your sign-up page could make all the difference too.
Being compliant isn't complex, but it is important. IXO Commerce ensures that you won't be caught out by government legislation - make sure that your existing systems can offer the same guarantee.
- Have you thought about whether the opt in box is pre-ticked on your website?
- Have you stressed the importance of customers updating their preferences and made it clear how they can unsubscribe should they wish too?
- Is your privacy policy up to date?
Would you benefit from a marketing integration?
Marketing integrations
If you're already using an email solution, it might be worth talking to us to see how we can make the most of automation to make your life easier. These can reduce labour intensive data entry, ease compliance with GDPR and provide your marketing teams with considerably more data. An integration with Mail Chimp, for example, not only exports newsletter signups and contact preferences, but customer interests, purchase history and more, all allowing marketing automation and enhanced segmentation.
We already work with a wide variety of great companies, so just get in touch!
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IXO Commerce is a digital operations platform built specifically for the modern retailer
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6th June 2019