I have eleven dictionaries. In addition, I have two thesauruses. To be fair, I only use five of the dictionaries with any degree of regularity, although the two thesauruses take a bit of a pounding. Like me, you might think I would be a whiz at Countdown. After all words are my job and I don’t only write about email marketing. Prepare for disappointment.

In a semi-final of Countdown a few days ago, the abilities of the looser were stunning. I was nowhere near him. It’s good to be brought down a peg or two, but I am relieved I do not regularly watch the programme. Remarkably, after all that effort, the prize the chap won was a copy of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. He must eat dictionaries.

Free gifts are an excellent way of encouraging subscribers to your email marketing lists. There’s something enticing about the word Free. But that alone is not enough and to offer the Concise, which a writer only uses when they are in a hurry, to a losing quarter-finalist shows a certain lack of appreciation of what the chap wants. Are you guilty of the same thing?

What you offer as an encouragement should be a choice based on information. Yet all too often an email marketing campaign will feature products left over from the previous one, which often had been extended because of poor results. As a way of clearing shelves it’s got a lot going for it. However, I doubt they got many subscribers for their efforts.

You must target these gifts in exactly the same way as you target an email marketing campaign; perhaps more so as you should be giving away something of value. If it doesn’t produce returns you’ve wasted your money, time and effort.

You wouldn’t give a loved one something you had left over, at least not more than once. So why do it for someone else you expect something back from? Work out what will enthuse those you want to sign up, otherwise the whole campaign will be a partial failure, and maybe even an expensive one.