Information for Businesses - Preface
(The Most Important Lesson on Internet Marketing You Will Ever Read)

It is almost insulting to say here that marketing is about two fundamental things - attracting the customer to your business, and keeping the customer attracted to your business once you have them. The Internet provides unparalleled power to do both of these. Maintaining a customer relationship via the Internet is both effective and cost effective - provided you do it right. This power also comes with its risks - it is incredibly easy to do the wrong thing and destroy a customer relationship forever.

While no reputable business person would even consider sending unsolicited bulk email to people they don't even know, it is worth mentioning here that doing that can result in severe damage to your reputation, and can result in your connection to the Internet being severed. Doing so is a breach of the Acceptable Uses Policy (AUP) of almost all ISPs, as well as being a breach of the Internet Industry Association Code of Practice, which does cover online vendors as "Content Providers" under the Telecommunications Act.

When you move to Internet marketing from a traditional marketing background, the first thing you need to do is "unlearn what you have learned." You need to be able to forget everything you know about customers and their response to marketing approaches, because the Internet is a new medium, with attributes vastly differing to traditional marketing methods. If you think of electronic mail as "just like postal mail", or "just like a telephone call," you will be setting yourself up for a costly and spectacular failure.

On the internet, your customers will expect to have complete control of their online experience - and if you even look like you're not going to give it to them, it's easy for them to find another vendor. Quite literally, the more control you give to your customers and your prospects, the longer you will keep them.

Think of it this way - would you rather have your customers complaining when they do get your promotional material, or when they don't get your promotional material? The difference between these is how much control you give to your customers. If you send any kind of bulk email to customers who haven't asked for it, you can expect to lose 33% of them right off the bat, and more recent figures suggest this number has increased - that's how much customers hate to receive unsolicited bulk email. On the other hand, if you give them a genuine, up-front choice, you can expect 90% of them to request the material.

Taking this approach also gives you a significant competitive advantage. Suppose you assume that your customer wants your promotional material, and send it to them without asking. Now suppose your competitor has asked that customer if they want to receive their marketing material, and the customer has actively responded "Yes". Whose message do you think the customer will open first? Whose do you think is more likely to be deleted without being read? Psychologically, people will treat the same thing very differently if they know they have asked for it.

As an example, let's study a few web forms.

Case 1 - No option on the form, automatic subscription

When a customer encounters this form they may not realise you intend to send email promotions. There are many possible uses for requesting an email address on a form - from allowing for order confirmation and status messages to tracking individual customers. In this case, the customer receives promotional material they're not expecting. Right at this point, you have lost 33% of them, forever, with no way of getting them back. Even sending them free product won't help you, because as far as they are concerned, you have already taken something from them that's far more valuable - their privacy, and their control of their online experience.

Some vendors like to use this method and put "opt-out" instructions in the email. This has several flaws. Firstly, the damage is already done - this isn't going to get the customer back. Secondly, doing this assumes that the customer will actually read the message that they already know they don't want. Thirdly, with modern email programs it's easier to filter out a vendor in the email software after this happens than it is to follow any remove instructions in an unsolicited bulk email.

Case 2 - No option, no mailing list

For vendors that don't send bulk mail to their customers, it seems at first that you could simply avoid the issue on your forms. Unfortunately this may mean the customer has to dig through your site to find a privacy policy, and if the customer can't find one, or doesn't have the time to look, it may be easier for them to find another vendor. In fact, they may already have your competitor's web page open in another window - comparison shopping is notoriously easy on the Internet.

It's best to clearly state your intentions. If you are only going to use the email address for order confirmation, construct your form like this:

Case 3 - A check box, defaulted to "Yes"

This form usually looks like this:

or this:

While you might think you're offering the customer a choice, many customers take offence at this. It looks like the vendor has decided on making the choice for the customer, and many consumers actually stop the order process at this point. Remember, your competitor's web site may quite literally be in the next window, and if it looks like they are giving the customer more control than you are, they are the ones who will get the business.

A second problem with this approach is you can't tell for sure if the customer left the box defaulted because they made the choice, or because they didn't notice the option. Missing a field is common for even the most experienced of Internet buyers, and if they miss your check box, telling them they left the option checked when they complain (assuming they actually complain and don't just filter you) will not get you the customer back. In fact, telling the customer that they failed to uncheck the option is like calling them an idiot, and is more likely to further entrench their ill will towards your business.

Case 4 - A check box, defaulted to "No"

While this option offers the customer a genuine choice, it suffers from one of the drawbacks of the check box defaulted to "Yes". The customer might miss the box, and then you could be missing out on an important communication opportunity.

Case 5 - Radio buttons with no default

This is the ideal type of form. The best version looks like this:

Please don't send me any announcements.	If you check this, we will only send you order confirmation and status information.
Send me critical announcements.	If you check this, we will also send you important announcements you really need to know, like a change in our web site name, or if we merge with another company so somebody else has your private details. You will not get other announcements.
Yes, please send me all announcements! I want to receive special offers!	If you check this, we will send you all announcements, including important announcements and special offers, with discount vouchers for products at our online store.

When you lay your form out like this, you not only make it easy for the customer to see their choices and understand what they are, but you know they have made a choice. If they don't make the choice, you can ask them to make the choice again when they submit the form - just as you ask them to submit their credit card number if they omit that. What's more, if they do miss the option, you get the opportunity to do a hard-sell on the mailings because you can take more space to explain the benefits of answering "Yes".

This form includes additional attributes that make the customer feel like they are in control. For one thing, it offers an additional level of control - customers can ask to receive only a certain type of very important announcement. For another, the colour coding makes it easy to see which option is which, and the explanations on the right give the customer the information they really need to make an informed choice. The use of green for the "send me announcements" option adds another psychological factor - given the choice between red, yellow and green, people are conditioned to opt for green. Even if you don't plan on doing any mailings, it's probably a good idea to use this technique so you can do mailings in the future.

A customer who sees this web form will feel much more comfortable with doing business with you, and is far more likely to actually say "Yes" to your mailings. In fact, when given a choice like this, empiricial evidence shows that around 90% of people answer "yes" to all announcements. People who do answer "yes" are almost guaranteed to become repeat customers, and that's good news by any standards.