Make it Conversational

For a little down-time while at the sales conference, we took a brief trip to the mall next to our hotel; we made purchases at five merchants – cupcakes, shoes, jeans, handbags and goggles. We were genuinely impressed; every single one of these merchants had a sign-up sheet for email. Three of these merchants even had really cute sign-up cards – cards that gave you great reasons to sign up.

The employees we interacted with asked us for an email id. Crisp, clear and directly – their point of service systems even had a field for the collection. Despite these items there was a serious problem, each seemed like a cold exchange.

I believe these merchants missed out on a valuable opportunity to interact with us. After having received our email id, they should have tried to sell the program to us. It would have been easy for them to create a sense of expectation. Those few moments could have resulted in us treating their communiqués a little differently, creating higher open rates and better overall conversion. Their email marketing managers would have been thrilled.

A suggestion to email marketing managers, train the store/ branch employee – provide them with conversational scripts that will request the id and give them ways to plug your program (after the sale.) More importantly, ask those employees to share their thoughts back with you – issues, remarks and ideas. Keep these employees in the loop, have a call with store/ branch managers, you will do a better job creating a program and maybe raise your click-throughs and conversions.