Hands in the Fishbowl

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I heard of a retailer who had a little bad luck with the law due to a group of overzealous employees. Assigned the task of growing their email lists, the store employees at a few prominent metro locations decided to approach local restaurants and offer the manager one of their gift certificates in exchange for the email addresses in their "Win a Free Lunch" fishbowl. See the issue – there was a nice boost in terms of emails collected but the recipients never asked for the solicitation, so there were a lot of complaints, unsubscribes and quite a bit of good will to remedy the situation once everything was sorted out.

Although I admire their enthusiasm, maybe it would have been better to have those employees approach the local area restaurants for a co-branded fishbowl. The concept is the same, but the offer includes the opportunity to win lunch from the restaurant and a gift card from your business.

Put together the associated collateral; subscribe page and a co-branded welcome email to reinforce the benefits of the program. From this point, you can operate independently until you’re ready to announce the winner… and may I suggest notifying by email too?