Leveraging Website Traffic to Build Consumer Database

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Category: B2C

Type: Database Marketing

Channel: Website

Industry: Retail

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Challenge:

 

According to Hubspot, email databases naturally degrade about 22.5% annually. Although Star Furniture was opting in new subscribers via in-store checkout as well as through paid media channels, they had a difficult time growing their list at a faster rate than the natural attrition rate. Star wanted an economical way to drive more subscriptions as well as attract quality subscribers who were likely to stay engaged. 

 

Our client asked us to get 1,000 new email subscriptions per month at less than $1 per subscriber. Additionally, with an unsubscribe rate lower than the retail industry list benchmark rate of .25% (source: MailChimp).

 

Solution:

 

We leveraged traffic on Star Furniture’s website to drive email subscriptions.

 

Step 1:  We knew that the client had a very high volume of unique visitors to their website each month. We also knew the majority of traffic was entering their homepage as direct traffic since the retailer was well branded and an established market leader in Texas. So we focused on leveraging this traffic to sign up for email since this was an untapped resource and, best of all, it was free. 

 

Step 2:  We worked with the client to develop a two relatively inexpensive monthly offers to test—a $500 gift card and a product give-away valued around $600.  

 

Step 3:  We created an online form commonly called a light box or a pop up on the homepage and alternated the offers so we could see which one performed the best within the given month. The form was prominently featured on the homepage with a strong call to action. The form took only a few seconds to fill out. To keep form friction to a minimum, we only asked for their email upfront and then sent a follow-up email to confirm their subscription preferences.

 

Step 4:  Our tests showed that the $500 gift card offer had a higher response rate; however, because the rates were relatively close, we decided to alternate the offers monthly.  

 

Result:

 

Not only did we meet our goal, we exceeded it by 80% with an average of 1800 new subscribers per month, and at a cost of about 28 cents per new email when factoring the cost of the offer.  What’s more, these new subscribers had a substantially lower unsubscribe rate than our list benchmark.

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