Turn Business Lobby into Offline Squeeze Page

I have a client who has lots of people come through his doors. I've talked with him about building his list and capturing the information of all of those customers. We talked a little about having people sign up for a drawing, and stuff like that, but I made another suggestion.

When you shop at most national retail chains (think GAP), right after they give you your total bill, they offer you "instant savings" by signing up for their credit card or rewards club. We've implemented the same system here.

For those that sign up in the store, they are given a % off their bill right then and there. In order to make the process simple and avoid having to enter customer info into our system later, we set up a netbook (tiny laptop) for customers to use to enter their own info. Have you ever tried to read people's handwriting when they fill out a form or application? It's terrible.

This way, they enter their own info and there's no more work on our part. The downside is, if you use double opt-in we have found there is no way to force people to confirm their email before giving them the discount. A lot of people only know how to check their email on their home computer, so figuring that out in another location and on another computer is too hard! To help with opt-ins we've placed another special offer in the confirmation email.

We haven't been doing this long enough to give any meaningful stats, but so far so good. We make sure to mention to them both on the "Thanks for signing up here's your savings" page, and verbally that they should look for an email from us, and tell them specifically what they'll get from opting in.

This does require you to buy a netbook, but those things are cheap. You can get the Linux ones for less than $200, and if your client doesn't want to buy one you could just rent it to him. The cable company still rents modems and routers to their customers, and they make a killing!