Subscribing to newsletters when purchasing merchandise online

Statistically very few people sign up for an online newsletter when purchasing gift ideas such as men's rings online. They view this practice as simply a marketing ploy by the online seller to badger them, to pester them, and to send them useless updates and information about products they are no longer interested in. We have seen many sites online that offer these newsletter capabilities but it is all a questionable activity in our minds. Why do they offer these services when so few people accept them?

It appears that the cost to use each ratio of an online news letter is extremely small in that there is no upfront cost and add that to the online store and it can be an automated feature without postage or assigned workloads for employees to send the newsletter to the consumer. In this respect it works. But broadly speaking when as few as one out of 1000 customers use it isn't really worth it?

For example on men's wedding bands.com we noticed that they have this potential activity listed on their site but that very few, if any, have ever used it. When speaking to the owners of the site it was suggested that they offer it as a convenience for those customers who may at some point in time choose to use the service but may not at the beginning. They say for instance someone revisiting the site to look for a matching style ring or a different ring that may be for an anniversary present instead of a wedding or maybe a new type of ring that they've seen in the mall, for them a newsletter could alert them to such potential products in the future. And it is for this reason that this company provides this type of opportunity online for consumers.

It would be interesting to determine the cost value ratio of those who have such pride to newsletters to see if they have repurchased from the online store-as in the case above a men's ring-because of the newsletter and if it helped them in some way remember the site they richly purchased from. Our research indicates that although the initial uptake rate is small for newsletters it is nevertheless a feature that should be used competitively by more and more online sellers whether or not they are in the men's fashion ring category or not.