Email is valuable. You know it.
More importantly, your guests know it.
For most venues, they use one or both of the strategies below to collect email.
1) Email Acquisition At Checkout: When guests buy you have the opportune moment to ask the guest to opt-in for email/mobile marketing messages. This approach is a must from my perspective. Even if you’re not doing mobile marketing messages, you should use this as a way to start building your list now, because it should 100% be on your radar if it’s not already.
2) Email Acquisition With Site Visitors: What about guests who aren’t buying anything but just viewing the website for content or hours of operation? For those folks I’ve seen a few different strategies used which boil down to:
Passive: “Join our newsletter” in the footer of the site
Active: Popping a message after X time on their site prompting a guest to join the newsletter.
We can do/be better. Let’s go back to our first statement; Email acquisition is valuable. You know it. More importantly, your guests know it.
If both parties know the information is valuable then perhaps approaching it from a give/get relationship would leave both parties happier with the results. What if instead you deployed the same strategy as every B2C retail brand on the planet and offered the old “Join Our Mailing List and Receive and Save $X on your next purchase?” You know they are more than likely trying to find a promo code already why not make it easy for them AND get their expressed permission to be added to your email list?
I’d challenge you to think about the Give/Get relationship across your guest experience. If you do, I promise you’ll get much better engagement.
