How to beat the top online fashion retailers at email marketing. Part 1: Subscribers

Online retailers love email marketing because it’s inexpensive, it has a high potential to drive profit, it’s permission marketing and is more or less easily automated.

Big brands do it: GAP, Victoria Secret, Overstock, Timberland, and almost everybody else. For a strong email marketing strategy you’ll need:

• Part 1: subscribers: the more, the better;
• Part 2: enough data about subscribers to know how to best target them;
• Part 3: email campaigns with great content that meet your subscribers expectations.

We did a study on 100 top online retailers from US and Europe to get a glimpse on the techniques used to collect new email subscribers. The findings were quite unexpected and offered good ideas on how improve collecting subscribers.

Incentives to subscribe

Incentives to subscribe are a tricky job. Discount incentives will probably increase the number of subscribers but the quality of the email lists is likely to decrease.

What surprised me was that around 40 of the studied online retailers posted only a simple subscription form on the website. Not only that they didn’t offer any incentives at all to convince people to subscribe, but not even a small clue of what the newsletter contains or how often would it is delivered.

We also argue the retailers that offer a discount incentive to subscribe. When people do it just to get an easy discount for their first purchase, they don’t really give you permission for future messages. They just want the discount.

I loved the 40 online fashion retailers that lured visitors to subscribe by being more or less creative in presenting benefits. They all answer one question: why to subscribe?

What I loved even more was that a small number of them offered a discount coupon as a thank you note for subscribing. Not only they obtained actual permission from their subscribers but they also offered a great incentive for a first purchase.

Email subscription form

The whole email marketing strategy depends on the performance of the subscription form and the data collected through it.

The longer the form, the higher chances the subscription rate will drop. The more data you collect about subscribers, the easier is to send personalized messages.

Out of the 100 online fashion retailers, 7 offered the possibility of filling more data on the subscription confirmation page. That allows for a strong balance between getting as many subscribers and getting as much data about them as possible.

Want to make it even more efficient? Offer a discount incentive to already subscribed users to fill in more data about them. Make sure you let them know exactly how you are going to use that extra data.

The setup is more or less easy to do, depending on your email service provider, but you can always hack your way in.

Personalizing email campaigns

In case you do decide to get more data from your subscribers, what data should you ask for? Here is how top retailers are doing it:

I would argue that the name should be mandatory. First name is sufficient: it allows addressing subscribers by their name in your email campaigns.

My second choice would be to ask for interests and a close third would be birthday. The reason for collecting such data is to use it for segmentation and targeting in order to increase campaign performance.

My advice: make sure you only ask for data that you truly use and that truly makes a measurable difference to your marketing campaigns.

Call to actions

In order for a visitor to decide if he wants to subscribe or  not, he first needs to be asked.

Sometimes, all you need to get a subscriber, is to ask at the right time. Ok, I am biased on this one as my team built PadiAct with the purpose of addressing this issue. Works like a charm: Ask the right people to subscribe, at the right time.

From our studies, targeting specific segments of traffic with specific message for subscribing increases subscription rate to 5-15%, depending on the audience and the targeting. Feel free to give it a try for free on your website.

Subscription methods

I was a little shocked to find out that only 5 of the studied retailers are requesting subscribers to confirm their subscription.

It’s true that by not asking subscribers to confirm their subscription, you’ll get more of them.

Good practice says: people need to confirm they want to receive your email campaigns. On the other hand, why ask most people to spend time confirming something they already requested for, for the sake of not upsetting the few of them who didn’t really want to subscribe or didn’t use their own email addresses.

Some of the retailers did it like this: as soon as I subscribed, they sent me a thank you email with an easy to spot link for unsubscribing. In case somebody subscribed by mistake or by somebody else, the unsubscribe option is one click away.

Till the next part of the article where we talk about segmentation and targeting, check out the eConsultancy Email Marketing 2011 Census, where 72% of the responding companies rated “email” as good or excellent for return on investment.

Your turn now

What’s your strategy for collecting subscribers?