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Email is one of the main digital marketing channels together with PPC, SMS, Organic Social, SEO. Email is primarily considered a channel focused on retention in e-commerce. (although that doesn’t always have to be the case) Compared to the other channels it typically has the highest return in terms of invested $ and effort. It is a relatively cheap channel and one that the marketing teams have a lot of direct control over its performance. It is also a marketing channel, which has a lot of potential to contribute incremental revenue and its performance depends a lot on the email team. There are eCommerce shops that contribute around 1% of last click monthly revenue from email and eCommerce shops that regularly contribute more than 10% of last click monthly revenue from email.

Despite its potential, many eCommerce companies do not pay enough attention to the significance of email marketing and the value it can bring. Therefore, we prepared this guide on the business case for email collection as well as going through successful email collection strategies that we saw being implemented across different eCommerce companies.

Most traffic and customers in eCommerce are acquired by paid channels such as Facebook Ads or Google Ads. However, the effectiveness of online advertising has arguably reached a plateau in recent years. More and more brands compete for the attention in the online advertisement space. The platforms and ecommerce marketers themselves have experienced regulatory pressure to be more privacy conscious in their data collection and targeting. Industry giants, like Apple have implemented restrictions as to how much data they will share with advertisement platforms.

If you do a good job when it comes to collecting emails addresses of your website visitors (and consents necessary for sending marketing communication to their inboxes), you will have an option to derive a big chunk of the traffic coming to your website from channels such as email. For brands that have really good email strategy, the portion of traffic coming from email can be more than 10% for overall traffic (30-40% for returning traffic).

This will have a significant impact on your expenses.

Consider the following example:

This means that you spend (20 000 * 30%) * $2.00 = $12 000 daily on returning traffic ($360 000 monthly.

Now, if you manage to reduce the proportion of paid returning traffic to 20%, because you are able to drive an extra 10% of traffic through the e-mail, you have saved $120 000 each month on paid promotion while achieving the same traffic coming to your website.

Many marketers decided to exclude customers with known email address from other paid channels all together. If a customer has already good engagement through email channel, why pay extra for other channels?

We do not recommend to stop using paid channels entirely, quite on the contrary we believe in omni-channel execution → where each brand uses the correct combination of channels that make sense in their context and the context of their customers. However, in our experience with working with more than 30 e-commerce brands over the last 5 years, we have noticed an overliance on paid channels to achieve performance.

Our recommendation is to take 5-10% part of that budget and invest every month into building an email collection and email marketing operation; which will bring in a much higher ROI accruing over time.

First of all, you should not be asking an email address from somebody who already gave you one. To a customer that has already shared their email with you in the past; it will add friction to their shopping journey. This is where CDXP’s ability to identify any visitor who comes to your website in real time comes really handy.

For visitors that already provided their e-mail address you should:

1st time visitors or anonymous visitors have not shared any information with you yet.

A lot of e-commerce shops are happy to display pop-ups targeting first time visitors asking them for their email-address (even before the visitor had a chance to see the shop itself). Often these “immediate popups” would include a 3 - 10% discount.

We advise against providing discounts in a popup window as soon as a visitor visits your website. They didn’t even have a chance to see what kind of products the shop is selling and immediately they are being offered them a discount. This is instantly decreasing the value of your brand and you are also risking to “train” your customers to expect discount everywhere and they may start to exploit this tactic (always providing different email address, waiting for cart abandonment emails providing further discounts, waiting for sales with their purchase decision etc…)

We recommend targeting 1st time visitors only once they have engaged with the site at least once or twice, depending on how aggressive your strategy on 1st time visitors is.

Collecting email addresses and marketing consents at checkout is the most basic source of e-mail addresses that every eCommerce company has. You are obtaining e-mails of your customers simply because of them providing necessary personal information in order to place an order with your store.

Don’t forget to collect necessary marketing consents in order to send marketing materials later on legally.

The website footer is the section of content at the very bottom of a website. Most of e-commerce websites that are collecting emails use it for email collection and easier website navigation. You can often find a simple sign up form placed and also a discount or a shop benefit if you sign up for the website's newsletter. There are many ways of designing a website footer so it is also an attractive part of the website. However not every customer scrolls down to the footer and that is why we consider it mostly an additional email collection strategy and not a primary one. Email collection using the website footer is often advised to combine with instant pop-up windows or regular pop-up windows.

Providing a % discount is probably the most common email collection strategy (besides checkout) that eCommerce companies usually deploy. The idea is simple. Subscribe to our newsletter and get a discount code for your first order in exchange. The discount is then “provided” to the customer through a combination of the weblayer itself and a confirmation email.

While this strategy is more effective at collecting email addresses than the same banner without a discount incentive it is important to remember that this also comes at a cost of the brand image. You are signalling to your customers that you offer discounts frequently and should wait for Sale events to purchase. This is a legitimate strategy, however discounting too much and too frequently can damage the brand value and price to value perception of your shop’s products.

Giving the same discount size to everybody is not an only option that you have here however.

Second option that you have is to give an option to your website visitor to choose the size of the discount they receive. Why ? First of all, with clever psychological tricks you might anchor your visitors to certain order size. Their initial intention could be to buy something smaller, but since the bigger order gives them more sizeable discount, they might opt in for that one instead. The end results are bigger avg. order size and increased browsing activity, because visitor is “incentivized” to explore more products that they may buy in order to use their discount. Secondly, giving a user an option to decide creates a stronger sense of “ownership”. “It is not just a random discount everyone would receive, it is a discount size I chose”. This may drive more of the customers to actually use the discount and convert.

Third option is so called “wheel of fortune”, which also provides an aspect of gamification. We are also employing clever psychology in this case. Rather than customer “receiving” a discount as everybody else, we give him an option to “win” a discount, which simply feels better. It is also an attractive visual to have.

Floating Minimized Banner

Do you know that feeling when you are going through an e-shop and a pop-up comes asking for your email and you instinctively close it - as many of us do - and continue your browsing because you are not yet willing to give up your email address?

As you scroll through the website, you find that you like it, you would now sign up for a newsletter or you would like to receive a discount that would make your decision to purchase something way easier, but the email sign up form is just not there and the pop-up sign up form won’t pop up again.

In case you would like to go a step further with your email collection banners, consider giving your users the option to “minimize” the email collection banner.

A solution for this issue is a “floating sign up button” that minimizes after the customer closed the initial pop-up. The button then “comes with the user” as they browse the site. However, due to its small size it does not disturb the shopping experience - it is simply there, somewhere in the corner to remind the customer of the possibility to receive a discount, shop benefit, or simply good content in your newsletter.

Another recommended strategy for new users are on exit pop-up banners, that trigger when customer shows an intent to leave your website. An on-exit behaviour is identified via the visitor moving their mouse cursor beyond the screen of the browser (usually doing so to switch tabs or close the tab).

For mobile devices, on-exit triggers are more tricky to implement because the mobile device lacks a mouse cursor for browsing and therefore it is more tricky to identify the intent of the customer to leave the site.

There are a few of options that can be implemented on the mobile to trigger as an “on-exit” intent such as:

Great example of successful implementation of this strategy is company called Public Rec. Here is a quote from a blog-post of an agency that implemented this strategy for them:

“At the time, Public Rec was starting to receive increased traffic to their website. We wanted to create a popup experience that converted a significant number of new visitors into email addresses. The difference between a popup that converts visitors into emails at 3% vs 9% is literally 3X list growth.”

As you can see on the screenshot, the banner included a timer countdown, which can be a useful tactic to accompany the giveaway , ticking away until the giveaway campaign ends. This nudges users to not leave it for later.

Whole blog post can be found here: https://www.quagrowth.com/public-rec-case-study.html

It is not necessary to employ any monetary incentive for website visitors to provide an email.

Instead of giving discounts you can provide some kind of shop benefit to your website visitors. Here are couple of examples:

This email collection strategy is a little different than the ones we mentioned previously. What a “refer a friend” email collection strategy does, is potentially collect two emails in one form. A banner of this kind asks for both the email of the visitor (if the user has not already shared their email) and the email of the friend. The friend of the user then receives an email from the user (via your ESP) where they also receive a discount. If the friend clicks through they are asked to sign up to confirm their identity.

“Referring a friend” is more complicated when it comes to GDPR and data privacy aspects. This is because the shop has not collected any consent from the “friend”. Nor is legitimate interest applicable in this situation as a basis for legal processing of PII, as no relationship with the “friend” exists, it is important to make sure that the email received by the friend is being sent by the customer who filled in the banner. Once the “friend” is to click through on the email received from their friend (but facilitated by your ESP) they land on a page that asks them to fill in their email address, to which they can receive the discount they asked for. Include a tick box that asks the customer to opt-in into your newsletters. If this tick-box on this “friend” form is ticked they have also joined your newsletter list.

This is an example of the refer a friend collection banner on the shop

This an example of how the received email looks like to the friend:

Referring a product to a friend

A more personal approach to this email collection strategy is to offer to your customer the option to refer a friend but not just your brand but a specific product on your site. This option would be discoverable via a button on the Product Page that would ask customers to refer this product their friend. This way the email the referred friend receives contains a product their friend recommends specifically for them. There are multiple benefits. This gives the friend a stronger reason to click through to the site to check it out, than just the strength of the brand image at large but a specific product. The strategy becomes an additional way for your brand ambassadors to spread the word about your products. It is a playful feature for visitors to interact with.

Don’t forget to use social media not only for digital marketing but also for collecting emails and building the email list. Add a link to your website or a direct link to a sign up form to your bio on different social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.

On platforms like Instagram, promote sign up form link via stories. The customer is going trough your Instagram stories and sees a post asking him to sign up for your newsletter. Your potential customer needs a reason to sign up. Whenever you are dropping new products, run an email discount campaign a giveaway campaign that is content exclusive to your email channel - post stories about your followers missing out on these benefits and that they can access them if they are to sign up in the next 24 hours.

Facebook and Instagram have an option to create a type of display ad, that allows you to collect new email addresses directly on Facebook or Instagram. These ads are effectively forms. You can then import these email addresses to do email solution of your choice and use these emails for marketing purposes. Here is an example of an integration that will allow you to import collected email addresses from Facebook Ads directly to Bloomreach Engagement (previously known as Exponea):

Some of the advantages of this email collection strategy are:

This might seem illogical at the first glance, because you are putting huge friction point to your website visitors, which might have negative impact on your conversion rate. And we do agree with this line of thinking. However, there are two big upsides with this approach.

Gating the whole website might be a radical move but it is necessary in order to achieve the best results possible in number of emails collected and data quality aspect.

However, there is a “middle ground” that will improve your data quality and also helps you collect more emails which is partial gated experience.

Instead of gating the whole website, you gate only part of it. You also have multiple options here:

In general, it is good to think about the strategies that incentives your visitors to identify with every session. Even small things like remembering customers size preference are great strategies when it comes to incentivizing visitors to identify with every session. However, bigger the incentive, the greater effect on email collection and data quality you will perceive.

Zero-party data is data that a customer willingly shares with a business. It includes things a consumer wants a brand to know about them, such as personal characteristics like size, style preferences, and purchase plans.

This data can be later used for different personalization use-cases (such as preselecting the shoe size across the store in order to decrease friction for customers that told us about their size preference). We will cover this topic in greater depth in our future modules on Data Collection and Personalization use-cases.

You can use website feature such as “shoe finder” by On Running for email collection as well. Imagine that last step in the questionnaire would be asking a visitor for his email address. You may limit number of recommendations that visitor will receive directly on the website to one, and you can offer to sent the complete list of recommendations directly to their inbox (see the example below whon another shoe retailer).

Another option is asking visitors to “save” their preference data by creating an account (where they will provide an email address), so they will experience more personalized shopping experience when they return to the store in the future.

There are many ways to compile a personality quiz. One way is to make the quiz about your company, about your brand, and by doing that you are making sure the customer is getting to know your brand more. You can design your quiz a hundred other ways to attract your customer and make him give you his email address. You can use seasonal questions or mix zero-party data collection with some interesting questions concerning your brand - you can play with it, but keep in mind that you want to engage the customer and make them excited to give you their email address to receive their results.

The quiz we used as an example starts with zero-party data collection and has one question targeting their customers - in this case women - that feels random but fun. After the customer answers these questions they are asked to give up his email address to receive a recommendation of products according to his quiz answers and to also receive 10% off his first purchase.

This is how the results look like on the website:

https://doebeauty.com/pages/mylash

This is how the customer’s results and the received discount look like in his inbox:

Audit your own email collection strategies with the help of the Datacop email collection strategies audit sheet. We use this sheet internally as a first step to map the landscape with our e-commerce clients when we QA, plan, discuss and A/B test email collection strategies with our clients.

If you found this post to be valuable, we kindly encourage you to share it with your friends and colleagues who may also benefit from it.

Additionally, we provide a free 45-minute consultation where we can discuss the technical, data collection, and human resource requirements needed to implement email collection strategies similar to the one described in this post. To schedule a consultation, please visit this link.

Thank you for your time, and we genuinely hope that the information shared in this brief post proves beneficial to you!

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