The value of an email keeps popping up in marketing circles these days. Why? Because direct marketers are trying to justify how important it is for store associates to collect customers’ email addresses. Sounds mundane, but it’s critical. If you have a customer’s email address, you can better understand and market to them with increasing sophistication and accuracy. Email addresses are like a marketer’s Rosetta Stone; they’re the most important data point within the identity system itself and provide a means to reach every different customer on their own terms. Emails are usually easy to understand in e-commerce, like the email address of an Amazon Prime account or Gmail as the key identifier in Google world. People gave up on usernames a long time ago; they can’t remember them half the time. When people create an account on a website, they use their email address. Retailers can tokenize that email address across digital channels to become part of the enormous identity system out there. It can be primitive — we can just blast emails — or you can leverage email along with an associate profile to send very targeted and personalized customer communications. Hurdles, Payoffs and Opportunity Lost Direct marketers are getting resistance from store personnel, who see asking for an email as extra work that slows down the transaction and customer experience. They don’t see the potential benefits of capturing customer data. They run a store where people open doors and come to shop. They might recognize a few customers, but they don’t have intelligence on them, so they can’t see the full view of the relationship. It’s not the same as really knowing your customers. But the fact is a lot of people say yes to email requests. Our clients often get an 80 percent capture rate; […]

Read Full Story – Value of an Email: Marketing’s Rosetta Stone, Part 1

Source – Total Retail