Email Marketing Strategy

Posted By emailadmin on November 1, 2009

Ho Ho Ho and Happy Thanksgifting.

I know we just finished up Halloween, however, the shopping season is upon us.  Major retailers are setting up their black Friday campaigns.  Whether you’re a small retailer or a large conglomerate, it’s time to put into action your online marketing plan for this holiday season now.

You shouldn’t use the same coupon week after week because it will turn people off.  I won’t buy something this week if I know that there’s going to be another 20% off everything coupon next week.  Have something really on sale.  You won’t get everyone buying it, but I suspect you’ll get better conversions since it will be more meaningful and it will capture the customers attention.

Last season, people were worried about their jobs and the looming recession.  Well guess what, many more of us are out of work, and are counting pennies.  What this means to you is that you’ve got two types of customers.

The first are those who are looking for deep discounts and will buy and store the presents.  In fact, they’ve been buying presents since last Christmas.  They are patient and will wait until the exact right price for the exact present comes along.  For these people, again, the highly targeted discount is very useful.  Amazon has their daily deals, and they often sell out.  So if you have multiple products, have one as a fire sale and see how well it converts.

If it doesn’t, perhaps most of your clients are the second type.  They have a limited budget and are waiting until the last minute to get the fire sale prices.  In fact, they may be more than likely to go into stores and try to negotiate better prices.  For these people, you need to give them a good reason to buy online.  Perhaps free shipping will be their tipping point.

Know your customers and know that it’s a tough market out there.  So get your holiday emails out there so you’re the one they want to buy from.

Category: Uncategorized | | No Comments »
Tags: Amazon, Black Friday, Budget, Campaigns, Christmas, Conglomerate, Conversions, email, Fire Sale Prices, Good Reason, Halloween, holiday, Holiday Season, Last Christmas, Marketing Plan, Multiple Products, Online Marketing, Pennies, Recession, sales tactics, Tipping Point, Tough Market, Waiting Until The Last Minute

Posted By emailadmin on August 21, 2009

I’ve been helping some new clients set up their mailing lists, and I have some lessons for you.

First, it is a good thing to capture email addresses. However, you have to ensure that they know you’re doing it. What if they order something from you, and you ask for their email address to send them a confirmation. Make sure that you have some notice in your order process that you will protect their email address, that you will not sell it, and most importantly, that you reserve the right to contact them in the future through this email address.

It can be something simple like: We’re asking for your email address to send you a confirmation, and potentially notices in the future. We will never sell your email address or send you garbage, and you’ll have the right to opt out at any time.

Another method is to put a link near the web form where it asks for email address, with the text “about this” or “privacy info.” You can then either do a pop-up window or send them to another page which has the boilerplate on your privacy policy as well as a single line that you retain the right to contact them via email in the future.

Why should you care? Well, if you have been saving email addresses, and you sign up with a place such as aweber.com, they are going to ask you if you have permission to contact these people. And if you cannot say in good conscience that you have these privacy policies in place, they’re going to reject your list.

Which means that you’ll be putting the email addresses in one at a time. Or does it? Nope, sorry again, but aweber.com does limit the amount that you can put in at a single point in time.

So let’s think it through.  You should have permission to contact them, so cover all your bases and have that line in first.  And then start saving email addresses until you’re ready to start sending emails on a regular basis.

Category: Uncategorized | | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By emailadmin on July 8, 2009

I see a lot of questions these days about how to get people to open your emails.

I’ll save subject lines for another time. But today, let’s talk about targeting and your reason for emailing. Some people believe in the shotgun approach where you send out an email to everyone hoping that enough people will open to justify the return on investment.
However, the problem with doing that often is that you numb your audience. At first, everyone is like a happy puppy and opens every email from you. But as time goes on and they see an email that has nothing to do with them, they stop opening, and worse, often unsubscribe.
So how can you keep them engaged?
First, look at what you promised them when they signed up. Did you offer an informative newsletter once a week? Are you still sending that or are you just sending ads?
Good email campaigns require a lot of self-discipline. It’s fine to send the ads occasionally as long as it doesn’t detract from the useful information.
One suggestion is to work with a copywriter (you can find good ones at elance.com or guru.com), and create 50-60 canned emails of information pertinent to your business. If you want to do a daily or 5 days a week, then increase the number accordingly, and shorten the mailing length.
Most good ESP’s (email service providers) have the ability to set up triggered emails. So once a person signs up, it should trigger a welcome message, and then start the series of emails as per your agreed upon frequency.
So what about the ads. Best practices dictate that you should target the ads to some kind of demographic. If the ad is for women’s shoes, obviously, sending it to women only is the better plan. If you have many brick and mortars, and you’re opening up a new store, sending an announcement of the grand opening to the whole list doesn’t make sense. Border’s made that mistake recently and sent out a special coupon to everyone even though they meant to target a few select zip codes. You can learn from their mistake, and identify where your email will be most effective.
So what if you don’t have this information? Part of list management is regular emails every 3-6 months asking people to log in and update their information. It should be handled carefully. You’re building up a relationship with them. So first you get their name and email address, and you build up their confidence when you only send them what they ask for. After awhile, you state that you need them to re-activate their account, or that you need them to verify information. And you ask them for zip code and gender. Perhaps later on, you can ask for household income, and other interests. Another is asking them top opt-in to special offers. This gets them to their account information on your website, and allows them to fill in more information while either opting in to get 3rd party ads or opting out. Remember, this is a long term process, and you need to treat the person’s information with respect.
When you do this, you’ll have people opening and reading your emails again in no time.

Category: Uncategorized | | No Comments »
Tags: email, mailings, marketing, open rate

Posted By emailadmin on April 9, 2009

This posting, we’re going to talk about the frequency of sending mailings.  What is frequency?  While it may be what you tune into on your radio dial, here we’re talking about how often a piece of your information shows up in someone’s inbox.  Some newsletters go out once a month, and others go out daily.  Alerts might only be sent out when there’s an emergency. How frequently should you send depends upon what your agreement was with the user when they signed up.  If you said they’d receive something from you occasionally, and you’re sending out emails every day, they’re going to unsubscribe and say you didn’t follow through with your commitment.  Losing a customers trust is never a good thing. There have been some recent articles stating that instead of just letting them unsubscribe, on the opt out page, you have a suggestion where they receive fewer mailings. People are using this more frequently.  Others request feedback as to why you’re unsubscribing.  Very few people fill these in. Ok, so you’ve got a clearly stated policy about how often you mail.  People have signed up.  What could the consultant do?  Data mine!    There is some wiggle room in the frequency best practice.  Unless you’ve clearly stated the day which you mail, you could try sending out the same mailing to subsets on different days to identify which has the best open and click through rate. The consultant can also review how well the information worked.  If you sent out  something you thought was thought provoking, and 10% unsubscribed, you’ll know that you can’t please everyone.

Checklist:

1. Make sure you have a clearly stated frequency policy on your sign-up page.  “Occasional” means different things to everyone.  You’re best bet is to be specific.
2. Have the consultant test days of the week and hours of the day to identify the best open and click through rate for your mailings.
3. Have the consultant review the unsubscribe vs. new subscriber rate.  If it’s regularly increasing, you may be fine with the unsubscribe rate.
4. Clearly tell the consultant how you’d like your statistics.  Do you want PowerPoint?  Excel spreadsheet?  Charts?  Conclusions or just raw data?

Prior posts in this series:

Working with Email Consultants Part 1

Working with Email Consultants Part 2

Category: business model | | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By emailadmin on July 3, 2008

Welcome back!

This time, we will discuss the receivers of your emails. Whether you’re a brick and mortar or virtual, your customers have one thing in common: they wanted to buy what you had.  So take a moment to think about what you are selling.

Let’s say for example you’re selling dairy products.  More specifically, organic dairy products that can only be purchased in health food stores.  Ok, you can figure out that your customer is someone who cares about their health, and is willing to pay a premium for that peace of mind.

But, Lara, you’re asking, what if I’m selling a variety of things? Or what if they want my products for a variety of reasons?

This is where segmenting comes into play!

Perhaps you know some people want organic dairy for their children.  You can send them a one off advert for your new frozen yogurt pop.  Probably a coupon would help.

And even better, some suggested placers in their area where they could redeem it.

So how do you learn all of this information?

Well, you could set up a few different newsletters and see which are the most popular.  And then send the targeted coupons to that distribution list.

More importantly, this is something you should be capturing as soon as possible.  Name, email address, gender, zip code.  The more information you can get up front, the better your targeting will be.

You will have far better results if you send a mailing to 10 people that you can say with confidence will want your product then you would blasting it out to 10,000 people who won’t read it.  Worse, some may unsubscribe because of it, and you dilute your effectiveness.

Now, what does this have to do with a consultant.  Well, if you know exactly to whom you’re emailing, you can tell your consultant to generate a mailing segment with specified demographics.    Knowing who your customer is will also help the copywriter come up with a few solid subject lines that can be split tested.  And it will help your graphic designer choose what to put in the creative.  (i.e. photos of men vs. women, adults vs. children, etc.)

And here’s the checklist:

1) Have you been capturing demographic data?  If not, start a plan to capture it.

2) Who is your average customer.  What are they going to want to see and hear from you?

3) Work with the consultant for creating a solid test segment, copy, and creative.

4) Test, Test, Test.

Next time, we’ll talk about the frequency of your mailings.

Prior Posts in the Series
Working with Email Consultants Part 1

Category: business model | | 1 Comment »
Tags: