Is an email address worth some cake?

As a member of many hundreds of loyalty and rewards programs, November will be a busy email month for me with all the birthday offers coming my way.

Birthday rewards are a staple diet of loyalty and rewards programs and tend to perform well on redemptions (from cases that I have seen).

One that captured my attention recently was from IKEA FAMILY, initially because it was a TXT (rather than an email) and also because the wording intrigued me…

“Someone’s got a birthday soon – and we got you a cake. To redeem it update your email at….”

Whilst the strategy to acquire my email has a value exchange with it and clearly it has one of Cialdini’s 6 principles of persuasion ‘reciprocity’ in play, I thought,

“… a cake for an email…ok, that’s a fair exchange”.

It then got my inner loyalty voice talking and I started to grumble to myself that a genuine birthday treat should have no strings attached, which is how I read into the tone of the text. However, without insider knowledge, I am guessing that they need my email in order to send me my cake offer. I will follow the process and let’s see what happens.

What’s an email worth?

This experience is a nice reminder for all businesses gathering emails – with or without a loyalty/rewards/VIP program, that there is a value in an email.

Have you calculated what an email is worth to your business? What I mean is, actually formulating the dollar value of an email: (example)

Emails sent: 1000

Emails opened: 300

Offer taken (click through to online purchase or redeemed in store): 50

Total revenue of 50 emails (customers): $5000

Average Value of email: $100

I know it’s obvious that an email is a customer, however formulating the value back to the email, adds more perspective on the importance of that mode of communication.

The next time you ask your team to gather emails from customers, highlighting to your team that the email is valuable (and what it is potentially worth), should motivate more emails to be gathered.

Of course there needs to be a clear value exchange for the customer to give you their email, be it cake or some other treat!

Have a happy loyalty day