Ecommerce Marketing Strategy: Email Registration

Having people subscribe to an email list is a great way for an ecommerce website to reach out. That’s because the people who subscribed willingly asked for the messaging. They are genuinely interested in what the website offers. At the same time, however, building the email list isn’t the goal -- sales are the goal. So don’t let email registration get in the way of a sale. There are right ways and wrong ways to do it.

Wrong: Some visitors to your ecommerce website will be put off if you ask or require them to register for an email list. This is true if you ask while they shop or, worse, before they even begin to browse your ecommerce website. Email registration for ecommerce marketing purposes should never be required to shop. Why would an ecommerce website want to put another hurdle between the shopper and checkout?

Right: It’s routine to require an email address at checkout for shipment tracking or in case something goes wrong. So get the email address at checkout and at that point give the shopper the choice to join the emailing list. If you earn enough trust for the shopper to join, also give them a transparent way to unjoin.

The takeaway: Give shoppers the choice to subscribe to (and unsubscribe from) your emailing list, don’t be pushy, and don’t make it mandatory. If the shopper wants to pay you money on your ecommerce website, after all, it would be foolish to hold out for money AND an email address. If you’re using the right ecommerce platform, you get the information you want and permission to market to them anyway.

Something novel: Provide a financial incentive for shoppers to join your email list. More than half of abandoned carts are due to shipping costs. So tell the shopper that if they subscribe to your email list, you’ll provide free or discounted shipping. With the right ecommerce platform, it’s easy to do and everyone wins.

How it works with Essent: There are a number of ways you can incentivize shoppers in the Essent SiteBuilder ecommerce platform. One unique way is to use the Survey tool to ask shoppers to register for an email list. Shoppers who opt-in will be offered a promo code. When the shopper uses the code, SiteBuilder then processes the promotion in real time. The promotion even attaches to the sales order in the Essent Compass Business Management System. The promotion is maintained all the way through the procurement, fulfillment, and shipping processes. Essent makes it easy to offer an incentive for email registration and keep track of the promotion all the way through the order processing path and customer history in CRM.

Catch the next installment: This is one installment in a periodic series on ecommerce marketing strategies. Subscribe to the Ecommerce Marketing Series to get future installments emailed to you. See the series overview to read previous installments.