Ecommerce Experiment

If you look at the most successful online shops in the market place you will see they rely heavily on email marketing. Therefore it’s really important that we build an opt-in email database rapidly. We are going to use quick and simple viral marketing techniques to build the database. Spam is an increasing problem for everyone using email, so it’s incredibly important that the data is gathered in a sensible and ethical way.

We are going to use an online prize draw competition to build interest in the site before launch. We will be giving away a few products and asking people to enter through an online form. The form will have an option to opt into the email distribution list to ensure only the people interest in our products receive the email.

Although we are running a pre-launch competition this is a long term market strategy and we will be running regular giveaways over the next 6 months. We are aiming to build an email marketing database of 10,000 active subscribers over this time frame.

We use what we feel is one of the best distribution systems in the market place which allows us to manage the mailing list to follow anti spam legislation. It will track sales, open rates, clickthroughs, demographics and much more. Most importantly the system will automatically allow people to unsubscribe and cleanse the data when hard bounces occur.

So the million dollar question is, “how do we get people to enter the competition en-mass?”

There are sites on the Internet that spread the word of online competitions. There are professionals who do nothing but enter online competitions and make money from doing so. For us this is very much a safety in numbers exercise of getting a huge number of people to sign up with only a certain percentage actually interested in our shop. Don’t forget that a further percentage of people will not want to be contacted by email and choose to opt out when entering the competition. Once we start sending marketing emails, we will lose further emails from hard bounces and people un-subscribing. Therefore to get 1000 active subscribers after the first email sent we need about 3500 entries per competition.

After 6 months of running the competitions we hope to have built the level of interest significantly to generate constant email sign ups. Our experience at carrotmedia has taught us this is a tried and tested technique which works fantastically for our clients.

Apparently (http://www.asos.com) holds an email list of over 2 1/2 million subscribers and costs per email address as £60. £60 being an average basket size. If you work out the numbers its quite astronomical. I’ll talk more on this in the near future.