A little over a year ago at Tommy Hilfiger, VP of ECommerce, Jared Blank, adopted an overlay to the homepage which popped up and prompted an email sign-up from visitors only on the first time they’d visit the site. He and the team thought about whether it might be annoying to visitors and deliberated for a while before deciding to go for it.

Fortunately, they’ve seen some great success from it and any fears that it might deter visitors were quickly quelled.

“We saw our bounce rate was entirely unchanged,” said Blank. “Between one to two percent of all people give us their email address that way. It has been a gigantic victory for us.”

Before the overlay implementation, Tommy Hilfiger had a flat email address retention rate. After the added feature, the company has at least tripled its email list.

Watch the short video below to hear how and why he and the team decided to go for it. And stay tuned for Part II of the interview with Blank, where he’ll talk a bit about some of the other important facets of modern day retail marketing…things that are too oft swept under the carpet like copywriting and affiliate marketing.