I was recently asked by a journalist from Marketing Week to comment on some research relating to consumer willingness to give data to a company or brand. The survey suggested that most consumers would be more than happy to provide their email address to a retailer when placing an order. However, the research also found that very few retailers ever ask.

This got me thinking – why do so many retailers fail to ask for email addresses? Is it forgetfulness? Do they think customers will be put off? Usually all it takes is a simple opt-in check-box – how hard is that?

And with tonnes of other research demonstrating that retaining an existing customer is much more cost-effective than acquiring a new one, the inability of retailers to include email sign-up options is staggering.

The subject was bought home to me again last week when I was working with colleagues from our dotCommerce business who are currently working on a benchmark study of top UK retailer’s websites (if you’re interested, you can sign-up to be notified when it’s available here).

One of the categories assessed was whether the retailers we looked at included data capture methods on the website. Our findings correlate very closely with the above research: less than half included the option to sign up to an email newsletter on the homepage or product pages and less that one in three offered the opportunity to opt-in during checkout.

This is pretty shocking considering these were some of the best-known names in UK retailing!

Retailers need to start seeing the buying process as a cyclical progression. A sale should be seen as the beginning of the relationship between brand and customer, not the end, but without acquiring their email address from the start the relationship is dead in the water.

Once data is captured, creating a bond with the customer is very easily done with email and if the relationship is handled in the right way – e.g. targeted messages with personalised content – the long term benefit should be a profitable one.

Turning customers into brand advocates, especially in these times of Twitter, Facebook and the like, can reap significant rewards and a long-standing, productive relationship. Including forward to a friend options within messages will encourage your recipients to share your content with their peers – and then they’ll do some of the hard work for you.

We’ve been offering social networking bookmarking links as part of our email platform since last year and the results we’ve seen demonstrate that when businesses get the right message to right person at the right time, the chances of them passing it on is high.

But none of this will be possible unless businesses ask the question in the first place. Ask your customers to consider subscribing to your newsletter and many will. Don’t ask and they definitely won’t!