Browse to Amazon.com and you won’t have to look too far to find products you want to buy. In fact, you won’t have to look at all. The site will read your cookie, check your sales record and serve up products that it thinks match your interests. Email marketers can’t deliver that kind of personalized sales service even though the penalty of delivering the wrong offers are so much higher.
An Internet user who doesn’t see a product he wants to buy on a website will leave and may come back later. An email reader who doesn’t see offers he wants to use, will unsubscribe and never buy again.
Filter Your Subscribers
One solution is to filter subscribers at registration. Firefly Photography, for example, a photography business in Philadelphia, invites leads to leave their email addresses when they use the contact form, then refers them to a page where they can choose up to seven different kinds of newsletters and promotions. That ensures that subscribers only receive information they’ve indicated they want to read but it does limit the ability to cross-market, build desire or push a brand. A wedding photography lead might not be interested in baby photography now, but she could be ready to buy in a year’s time. Because she won’t have received the baby photography newsletters though, she might not order it from Firefly.
