e-mail marketing

Let’s call this reason #57 for having an e-newsletter.

The headline is a a paraphrase of a voice mail left by a client’s client for whom yours truly writes, designs and distributes a weekly e-newsletter. The client, a retail plant nursery, had announced a special “dollar sale” on summer plants with the e-mail. As you can gather from that quote and the fact that the client volunteered that information, the sale was a big success.

You’re probably saying, “Sure, you can get that type of response when you sell things for a dollar”. There’s no denying a great offer makes a difference in getting almost immediate response. Yet if this particular e-mail was the first one you received, chances are you might not have jumped in your car and went straight to the nursery as what happened with this client.

This particular e-mail was successful for several reasons. The offer is one. Another is how our client collects e-mail addresses, mostly through a sign-up sheet at their two locations. So the people on the e-mail list have already visited their establishment and have a pretty good idea about the quality of the product. Yet what really makes people get in the car to take advantage of this sale is the relationship they have with our client.

You see, besides an initial visit to their store, customers have received a weekly e-mail via Constant Contact since March. So, even though they may not have set foot in the store since early spring, they hear from our client every week. To the customer, it’s an ongoing dialogue. It says, “we’re still here, why don’t you check out what we have on sale this week”.

The most interesting part of this particular sale stems from the number of people who opened the e-mail. At the time our client left the message, the e-newsletter had the lowest percentage open rate of any e-mail we had sent. Let me repeat that:

The lowest open rate of any e-mail we had sent!

Confused? Don’t be because there are a couple of reasons why. First, the list is larger now so a lower percentage open rate doesn’t necessarily mean fewer people received the message (More than 30 percent of the recipients opened, which is excellent). The success of the sale combined with the slightly below average open rate does indicate the strength of the relationship (AKA loyalty) with our client and his core customers. And that’s truly why a regular e-newsletter to your customers is the biggest no brainer in business, no matter what product or service you sell.

If you are interested in starting your own e-newsletter to enhance the relationship with your customers, please drop a line or give me a call at 617-848-0848.

Let me break this to you gently: you are not reading it.

The perfect e-newsletter features a smoking subject line that demands, not asks, that you open the e-mail.

The design and layout looks like a piece of art. Subtle and sophisticated, it complements the words on the page beautifully.

The first headline fastens you to your seat like a nail gun at close range.

The articles suck you in and command you to call, click or e-mail, credit card or checkbook in hand.

The perfect e-newsletter.

And you know how many people will read that perfect e-newsletter?

That depends on one key factor: -whether or not you actually sent it.

It’s a trap that many small business owners fall into. You want your e-newsletter to be perfect. What happens is you sweat the tiniest details and then get caught up in the other many details of your business. Consequently, you miss an easy opportunity to consistently stay front-of-mind with customers/clients, prospects and, probably most importantly, your network.

One of the many beauties of the Internet age is the ease in which you can evolve your marketing materials with very little associated costs. A website, for example, is never truly finished because you should always be adding content. It’s the same for an e-newsletter. You put out your best effort and then keep tweaking to make the next effort even better.

Will it cost you business if you put out an e-newsletter that not done particularly well? Maybe. Will it cost you business if you do
nothing and you don’t maintain consistent contact with your target audience? Most definitely. And that’s the true price of perfection.