Ecommerce and shop customer database

I often say that one of the most valuable assets of a retailer is their customer database. It does not matter if you sell online using an ecommerce website, or you just have a shop with an EPOS software system, keep a list of your customers is vital to your business success.

Fundamentally, this means collecting names, address, and most importantly, email address of every customer who either visits your shop or buys something on your website. This information can then be used in a permission marketing campaign to boost sales.

There are numerous email marketing websites out there which allow you to upload a list of email address and send you a nicely formatted marketing email. However, if you just email anybody your response is going to be poor. Harvesting email addresses from the internet sounds good, but at best you will get a poor response. At worst you will get your marketing account closed and black listed for spamming people.

The people who are most likely to appreciate your marketing email as those people who have already shopped with you, or expressed and interest. Emailing this list of customers, and maintaining the mailing list of people who wish to unsubscribe is very important. Email marketing websites do such a good job of this that their fees are more than justified.

You need to collect email addresses at every possible point. In the shop make sure your EPOS software allows you to collect customer data. Your website needs a Mailing List signup feature. Every time somebody uses the "tell a friend" feature on your website, you need to collect their address.

The importance of emailing customers cannot be overstated. If I've got 1000 email addresses of existing customers, and I email them all once a month, I can easily expect 5% of them to make a subsequent purchase over the next month. If each sale makes me £50 then the costs are well justified. Sending 1000 emails a month will cost you about £30 at a typical email marketing website.

Mind you, emailing some list harvested off the website is a different case. If you email 1000 email addresses which are NOT customers, just emails you have scraped off forums and websites, then you can safely expect less than 0.1% conversion - you end up losing money on the campaign.

You really need to instill a culture of customer address data collection in your staff. Track which staff collect email addresses and offer incentive to those that capture the most. A decent customer file is a hugely important asset - try not to overlook this!