Emailing is rapidly becoming the preferred method to contact many customers with harried lives that seldom check snail mail and pay their bills or do personal financial work when time permits (or insomnia dictates).
The ability to email receipts to customers is a great service offering and an opportunity to add a personal touch to a customer’s experience. Like me, these customers would prefer a convenient email copy instead adding to the wad in their billfolds.
However, the real benefit for the retailer is capturing email addresses at the point of sale. Most importantly, collecting emails links each sale to the customer’s history profile for preference tracking and future marketing opportunities.
By recognizing and accommodating each customer’s contact preference we can also significantly lower the cost of marketing compared to bulk snail mail and shotgun advertising blasts.
I definitely prefer to have my receipts emailed to me – I save *everything* on my computer (you don’t want to know how many auxiliary hard drives I have plugged in…heh!) and it’s much easier to do a search for a specific receipt than it is to sort through a pile’o’paper receipts. 🙂