Overview

This chapter discusses how to use online marketing to acquire new customers and migrate existing offline customers online. Capture of e-mail addresses and profiling information is key to this, so a large part of this chapter is about building a house e-mail list. We will also explore how to use e-mail as part of online customer acquisition.

Chapter objectives

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

• devise different approaches to building a house e-mail list

• evaluate the quality of rented e-mail lists

• assess the use of e-mail sponsorship or advertising

• use e-mail to convert leads to sales.

Chapter structure

• Introduction

• Building a house e-mail list

• Stage 1: Devising incentives

• Stage 2: Using online and offline communications to drive traffic to the web site

• Using a rented list of e-mails to acquire customers via e-mail

• Placing advertising in third-party e-mail newsletters

• Usenet

• Stage 3: Revising web-site design to emphasise offer

• Stage 4: Defining profiling needs and capture form

• Stage 5: Selecting permission levels: what does opt-in really mean?

• Stage 6: Drawing up a privacy statement

• Stage 7: Defining the opt-out

• Stage 8: Follow-up registration

• Other forms of customer acquisition

• Keeping e-mail addresses current

• Viral marketing

• Measuring acquisition effectiveness