Research Brief: Capture Email Addresses While Consumers Shop

Thursday, July 2, 2009 Capture Email Addresses While Consumers Shop The 2009 Email List Growth Study whitepaper by ExactTarget, in collaboration with the Email Marketers Club, and the Center for Media Design at Ball State University, addresses an ROI-producing email list growth strategy at the top of most email marketer's list of primary concerns. The compilation finds that capturing e-mail addresses when consumers are highly engaged was found to be the quickest and most productive way to grow the files. Those points of contact include point of sale, consumers shopping online, and in-store via text messaging. These methods rated as much as 60% higher over such offline tactics, including mass advertising and list rentals. Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget's director of research and strategy, quoted in a release said "... list growth tactics are built on gathering subscriber data rather than hunting for it... the best way to grow your subscriber list is to collect information during customer-initiated interactions." On the other hand, the most inefficient ways to try to capture the addresses, according the study findings, include through outbound call centers, list rental, e-mail append and offline advertising. In addition, the report notes that one worrisome finding is that 33% of all e-mail marketers don't bother to evaluate the performance of their list gathering techniques. Other top findings reported in the whitepaper include: The best performer for capturing e-mail addresses: Onsite registration followed by inbound call centers, point-of-sale and through social sharing B-to-B marketers showed better results capturing the address with incentivized registration, while B-to-C marketers find non-incentivized subscriptions most effective Mobile phones are the up-and-comer when it comes to capturing, or allowing customers to subscribe to e-mails. This method is expected to increase faster this year than any other list growth tactic... more than 500% Enabling subscribers to share e-mail content with their social networks is expected to increase more than 348% in 2009 Tamara Gielen, founder of The Email Marketers Club, concludes that "There is... no one tactic that will provide meaningful list growth... successful list growth strategies employ... tactics to drive new subscriptions and compel subscribers to register because of the value of the communication itself." The complete 2009 List Growth Whitepaper is free and available for download online here.   This commentary is insightful. I recommend it to others. Post your response to the public Research Brief blog. See what others are saying on the Research Brief blog.   We use the term research in the broadest possible sense. We do not perform an audit, nor do we analyze the data for accuracy or reliability. Our intention is to inform you of the existence of research materials and so we present reports as they are presented to us. The only requirements we impose are that they are potentially useful and relevant to our readers and that they pass the rudimentary test of relying on acceptable industry standards. We explicitly do not take responsibility for the findings. Please be aware of this and check the source for yourself if you intend to rely on any of the data we present.   You are receiving this newsletter at phamquochuy1980.haiphong@blogger.com as part of your free membership with MediaPost. If this issue was forwarded to you and you would like to begin receiving a copy of your own, please visit our site - www.mediapost.com - and click on [subscribe] in the e-newsletter box. For advertising opportunities see our online media kit.   If you'd rather not receive this newsletter in the future click here.   We welcome and appreciate forwarding of our newsletters in their entirety or in part with proper attribution. (c) 2009 MediaPost Communications, 1140 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001