16 Ways To Capture Customer And Prospect Email Addresses

Circulation Management, Oct 1, 2002

When it comes to acquiring new business, cold emailing is attractive in theory, but problematic in practice. Quality, permission-based email lists are still relatively scarce, their costs are still high, and the glut of email in in-boxes is impacting response rates.

But that doesn't mean that you should ignore the e-world. Smart circulators are using a variety of methods to obtain more permission-based email addresses from existing customers and targeted prospects.

Michael Feldstein, director of alternate media for Boardroom, Inc., points out that while the benefits of building an email file should be obvious, their combined power for improving circulation margins is sometimes underestimated.

Feldstein lists five core benefits:

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An online renewal, additional subscription or ancillary product order is often far more profitable than the same order generated through direct mail.

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Email's low cost makes it possible to promote titles and products to customers and prospects you wouldn't ordinarily mail. This is particularly important in reactivating old expires.

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With email, a two-step marketing approach suddenly becomes viable. Unless you're marketing a very high-priced publication, it's rarely cost-effective to use standard mail to send a free sample or teaser gift and then try to convert these prospects into paying subscribers. But publishers can generate substantial volumes of low-cost leads by offering a free e-newsletter or online editorial premium, then using email for conversion efforts.

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Email can be integrated into the rest of your marketing efforts to your best customers as a means of building loyalty and boosting response to renewal and other cross-promotional efforts.

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Using email to encourage customers to perform address changes and make subscription queries online can result in significantly lower customer service costs.

All in all, a very attractive pro-position. The challenge, of course, is obtaining these email addresses in a climate in which people are increasingly reluctant to accept more overtures from online marketers.

Feldstein has developed a checklist of 16 techniques that have proven effective for Boardroom - which publishes newsletters in the personal finance, health, retirement and tax areas - and other publishers. While many may sound familiar, relatively few publishers can say that they have exploited all or even most of these.

"The 'secret' to capturing higher levels of email addresses is consistent use of a variety of methods in combination," stresses Feldstein. He suggests that circulation marketers try to implement each of these methods over time, as resources allow.

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PROMOTE YOUR URL IN EVERY POSSIBLE VENUE. Some publishers find it more effective to create individual URL's for each of their brands; others realize more leverage from a single URL. (Boardroom, for instance, made a strategic decision to use BottomLineSecrets.com as the umbrella URL for all of its products.) Either way, a fundamental key to driving site traffic is making sure that the URL is printed on every piece that goes out of your building, including stationery, promotional mail, the magazine itself (include it in page folios, as well as the masthead), premiums, bills, envelopes, insert cards and other ancillary materials.

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CREATE A FREE E-NEWSLETTER AND PROMOTE IT HEAVILY. Boardroom's e-newsletter (currently distributed to about 300,000 customers and prospects) is one of its primary sources of email addresses. While this might sound like an expensive proposition, Feldstein confirms that, for Boardroom, the editorial and delivery costs are outweighed by the high-margin orders generated from embedded ads and the cost savings on renewals and customer service.

To serve its purpose, an e-newsletter must offer useful, timely and relevant content. The most effective ways to get people to sign up for the e-newsletter are to insert opt-ins all over your Web site and promote it in your print publications.

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RUN SWEEPSTAKES AND TIE ENTRIES TO PROVIDING AN EMAIL ADDRESS. Like many marketers, Boardroom has found that people will gladly supply email addresses in return for the chance of winning a sweepstakes. "The prize needn't be particularly impressive," points out Feldstein. "In fact, some campaigns achieve excellent results with sweeps offering a prize of just $100, or even a free subscription or book." To maximize response, he suggests changing the prize regularly.

While the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general have so far stayed away from the online sweepstakes world (perhaps because most sweeps sponsors make it clear that no purchase is required for entering), marketers do need to be vigilant about ensuring that every promotion adheres to legal requirements.

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USE VIRAL MARKETING. Viral marketing has been used to build a number of major online businesses (BlueMountain, Hotmail) very quickly - and it can also work for publishers. The most obvious method is promoting the "forward to a friend" feature. Boardroom provides an easy-to-use forwarding method at the bottom of every issue of its e-newsletter. Feldstein notes that software is available to track the volume of forwards, as well as the number of e-newsletter sign-ups.