A Paradigm Shift for Retail Email?

Though I've lauded certain e-tailers like Barnes & Noble on this blog for some excellent campaign execution, it's still both frustrating and astonishing to see so many brands are not getting the message (no pun intended) that a lack of truly personalized email content is turning-off customers. However, I ran across a San Francisco-based firm (ShopItToMe.com) today that has implemented a customer-controlled approach that may start a trend in the way other e-commerce organizations communicate with their customers via email.

The beauty of this site is that not only do customers control the content they get, but they save money at the same time. When you start the profile building process, you define all of your apparel and designer preferences. For example, I may only want content relative to men's outerwear and athletic shoes in sizes XL and 12 respectively manufactured by Adidas and/or Nike that is currently on sale. Whatever your fancy, you are the Burger King as you "have it your way" when placing your email special order.

Once the profile definition is complete, ShopItToMe delivers the goods as the user gets his/her made to order email within a couple of minutes as seen below (note: click on the creative to enlarge):



Of course, I'm not privy to the level of effort required to pull this publishing model off, however it's got to be worth it given the well-documented disparity between the costs required to keep customers versus attracting new ones.

To conclude, I think this site is on to something great and I would highly recommend that the e-tail community to follow suit to help reverse the trend of lower response metrics (as cited in Epsilon's "Q1 2008 U.S. Email Trends and Benchmark Results" report) and, as noted above, increased customer apathy verging on scorn.