I received an email last week from a well-known high street brand who probably ought to remain nameless. The 'From' address was clear and the design looked attractive. It was even nicely personalised – ‘Dear Mr Cooper’ it began. So far so good – but the impression was rather ruined by the first pargraph of content in which they were trying to sell me women’s underwear...

If you keep up with email blogs, you’ll be well aware that one of the key words of the moment is ‘relevance’. The more closely you can target what you send to recipients, the better they will respond. It’s such a no-brainer that I can’t understand why so many people haven’t got it yet – but based on my experience, many clearly haven’t.

But one of the questions we are often asked is, how can you find out all this information about customers without subjecting them to the Spanish Inquisition when they sign up? Surely people aren’t going to give you all that valuable information about themselves just because you ask them.

My answer is that if you explain to people what the real benefits will be to them, then they’ll be willing to tell you a fantastic amount. More importantly, the time to do this is *after* you’ve signed them up - by using a structured welcome programme you can tempt the customers to order by using strategic offers, and you can also ask them to help you to send them information which will be more relevant to them.

Here are two examples:

• The world-famous toy shop Hamleys asks people to provide the birth dates of their children in order to receive a reminder to visit the site and buy birthday presents.
• The online fashion house Net-a-Porter asks for your favourite designers (and your dress size) so they can immediately tell you when the hottest items are in stock.

It takes some effort but both of these companies have seen their revenue from email increase as a result - as well as receiving fewer complaints from customers who have been accused of cross-dressing!

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