LastMinute.com converts subscribers into customers
UK-based LastMinute.com CEO Martha Lane Fox answers some questions in this Wall Street Journal piece (subscription required) on a new economy business that is still standing. They have some 6.5 million subscribers of their email newsletter in England and another 1 million in Germany...and get many of their new customers from these subscriber lists:
That's the first stage: capturing those people and then converting them into customers. That's a lot cheaper way of building your customer base than going out there and trying to buy TV advertising, buying offline media space, all this kind of stuff. A year ago, 12% of those subscribers were customers. Now, it's 20%. In another year, we hope it will be 30%. So those are huge changes in the levels of people becoming customers from that e-mail.