Email Marketing in Retail: user acquisition

One of the most vital aspects of an email marketing strategy is the uptakeand today we will provide some ideas on how to achieve growing the mailing list of retail companies. However, let's not forget that although acquisition is the basis of email marketing, without careful data management and an appropriate strategy to make our messages relevant, getting a large number of registrations may not do us any good.

The first thing to consider is that the best audience we can have is our own customers, so the first places where we can find sign-ups to our email marketing list is in our shops, both online and offline.
 
Online shop: to buy the user must register in the online shop and in this registration we must take the opportunity to give the user the option to receive relevant communications, promotions and other information of interest.
Physical shop: Sometimes, given the digital nature of email marketing, we forget that offline is also an important source of users for our mailing list. In this case, special care must be taken when collecting data so as not to generate inconsistencies in the database. Ideally, you should have a computer system in your shop that allows you to validate the consistency of the information entered with the formatting requirements of the fields in the database. However, in many cases we find that the data is collected manually on paper, or Excel and as a consequence the possibility of erroneous data increases. In these cases, Digital Response has tried to provide a solution to these circumstances by adding an intermediate step between the collection and uploading of data to the company's submission platform/database. After an analysis of the data we are able to receive, we can programme a standardiser that cleans the data received, homogenising the format of the information (For example, for the city field we can receive "BARCELONA", "bcn", Barceolna,... and the programme would normalise all this data to "Barcelona", homogenising and improving the quality of the final information).
Online subscriptionIn addition to current customers, we will try to reach potential customers. To do this, we will offer the possibility of subscribing to the company's communications to any user browsing the website. In this sense, we can test the location of the subscription form, the number of fields requested or the steps of the process in order to optimise conversion.
Social networking: We often find large audiences in brands' online communities that we can potentially reach through email. We should then look for ways to convert social media users into subscribers. This can be achieved with sweepstakes and contests, which tend to work very well on these channels.
One aspect to bear in mind is that the way in which we obtain the register affects its quality. A registration obtained thanks to powerful incentives will be less qualified than a user who subscribes through a web form because of their own motivation to obtain information about the brand. A simple form in which we only ask for the email address will obtain less qualified registrations than a form that demands many personal fields and also uses the double opt-in.
In addition, we need to focus our strategy on converting subscribers into customersThe purchase will be the best engagement enhancer, as well as our ultimate goal.