Email Designer

What if you don’t sell your products online and don’t plan to in the future? Is email marketing still a worthwhile investment? You can still have incredible success using email marketing even if you don’t sell your products directly from your website, though you will approach your advertising slightly differently. A shoe store in Edinburgh drove sales to their brick and mortar store using email marketing even though they don’t plan to ever offer ecommerce on their website.

Brick and Mortar Success

Helen Bateman owed this shoe store in Edinburgh and would never consider selling her shoes online because she felt that in order to buy shoes her customers needed to at least have a phone conversation in order to ensure she could get them the right shoe. She decided to try and use email marketing to increase sales both locally and internationally. Many of her customers were tourists who she would lose potential sales from when they returned home.

Bateman created an email campaign that mimicked the look of a postcard. She would then send virtual postcards to her customers. The postcards had her shop logo, address, and phone number displayed prominently at the top and on the left hand side a quick 2-3 paragraph note about a featured shoe in the style you’d expect from a postcard. At the bottom she had four links:

• Write us
• Register here
• Tell a friend
• www.helenbateman.com

The campaign was incredibly successful. One of the more successful postcards increased sales 700% on the featured shoe, 50% of which were purchased over the phone from outside of Edinburgh.

Just because you don’t sell your products online, doesn’t mean that email marketing can’t help get the word out and increase sales.

So far we’ve discussed mostly email newsletters. Having a broadcast email you send out to subscribers on a regular basis, whether it be weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, is extremely valuable; however, there are some types of email that you send to your customers that can have even better results.

Welcome Emails

Everyone loves to get welcomed. Any email newsletter will have an opt in/out system. When a customer first signs up for your newsletter, send them a friendly welcome email thanking them for subscribing to your newsletter. This lets the customer know that signing up worked and it also makes them feel like you care about their subscription. You can also use welcome emails to promote occasional sales. Providing discounts or special offers in a welcome email gives the customer an immediate sense that they are getting value out of signing up for your newsletter, and if the customer feels like they are getting something of value from your newsletter they will be far less likely to unsubscribe.

Abandoned Cart Emails

For any online retailers this is a must. When customers shop on a website they add various products to their ‘shopping cart’. They can then at any time go to their shopping cart and buy anything they have added to it. But customers often add items to their cart and then leave without buying anything. Sending these customers reminder emails that they have items in their cart often results in sales.

In order to send these customer emails you will first have to set your website up in a fashion that allows you to capture their email address before they add anything to their cart. The easiest way to do this is to require your customers to sign-in to your website before adding anything to a shopping cart. As part of the sign-up process, ask for their email.

When it comes to actually sending out the reminder emails there several different tactics. In my opinion the best way to get results is to send out one email as simple reminder that the customer has items in a cart a day or two after the cart is abandoned. If this approach doesn’t work send out a second email offering an incentive for the customer to make the purchase: free shipping or 5-10% off their order, something small that might get their attention enough for them to buy. If offering a small incentive doesn’t work, sending out one final email with the most aggressive discount or incentive that you are willing to offer to try and get the purchase.

These are just a few ideas of emails other than your broadcast newsletters that might prove profitable.

Should your company consider outsourcing your email marketing? It really depends on the size of your company, your budget, and what you want out of your email marketing. Here are some key factors you’ll want to take into consideration when deciding whether or not to outsource your email marketing.

The Size of Your Company

Size really matters. If you’re a company with thousands of customers you want to email and hundreds of employees, you may want to seriously considering hiring a third party to take care of it for you. If you do decide to keep it in house, hire a person or a staff of people, to run your email marketing. Now if you are small company it might not be cost effective to hire a third party to run your email marketing. For smaller companies getting an email marketing service that provides templates and date collection can be a much more cost effective way to run your email marketing. Check out our previous blog for more information about what to look for in an email marketing service.

Email Service vs. Outsourcing

In my opinion these are your two real options for email marketing. An email marketing service will provide templates, list management, comprehensive data collection about your email campaigns, and other features that aid you in your email campaign. However, it will not do all the work; it’s simply a tool that you use to create your own campaigns. Outsourcing is hiring a marketing firm to do all of your email marketing for you. While outsourcing your email marketing is probably the easiest way to handle it, there are a few drawbacks. Money is the biggest drawback. Obviously hiring someone to do it for you is the most expensive option, but you will benefit from having experienced professionals take care of your email campaigns.

Getting a good email marketing service, such as Email Designer, and doing your campaigns yourself, will save you a lot of money. It will also take considerably more work and you could potentially make mistakes that a professional email marketing staff wouldn’t make. If you use an email service make sure to research some of the best practices and advice from more experienced email marketers. Managing your own campaigns does give you completely control of campaign.

When it comes time to start sending out email newsletters you will need to consider what you are going to use to generate your templates and send out each email. If you were thinking of using outlook or your Gmail account, stop right now. While those might work great for your personal or company email needs, you will run into countless problems if you try and scale them. You will need to use a service that’s specifically designed for email marketing. Here are several key features you’re going to want to look for in any email marketing provider.

Build Target Audience

A good service will allow you to search your distribution lists using countless filters. You need be able filter by demographics, geographical location, how a customer responds to a questionnaire, or any other subset you wish to target.

Manage Lists

You will want to be able to manage your lists in a number of ways. The service should allow you to import large lists and allow you to search those lists for duplicates so you don’t send the same person two emails. You should also be able to segment your lists in whatever way you want so that you have the flexibility to create as many lists as you need. It is also useful to be able to export your lists into multiple formats.

Customizable Templates

A good service should allow you to create customizable templates which allow you to insert your branding and advertising material. Your emails need to look professional and easily recognizable.

From Addresses

You also will need control over the ‘from’ addresses. This is very important because must of your customers will decide whether or not to open your email based on the ‘from’ address. If they don’t know who it’s from, they will probably think it is junk.

Interaction with Social Media

If your company is actively using social media marketing, you will want your email campaigns to be able to interact with social media. Your customers should be able to ‘like’ your emails, or easily Tweet the link in them.

Data Collection

Data collection is imperative. If an email service does not provide detailed data about your emails, run for the hills. You should be able to receive data about how many of emails were received, opened, clicked-through, forwarded, bounced, and so on. If you can’t get this data you will never know whether or not your email campaign is working or not.

Subscribe/Unsubscribe

The key to email marketing is that it is an opt-in system. Those on your email list are on it because they want to be. It needs to be easy to both subscribe and unsubscribe so that your customers know that it is voluntary.

Save Data on Past Campaigns

Saving data on past campaigns is important because it allows you to compare all of your past and current campaigns side by side so you know what has worked and what hasn’t.

These are some basic features that every email marketing service should provide. If you are looking for a service, check out Email Designer.

In the world of email marketing new ways of reaching your audience sprout up every day. While creativity and ingenuity are key to a successful marketing campaign, don’t try and re-invent the wheel every time. Learn from others mistakes. Here are 7 things to avoid in email marketing.

1. !!Excess!ve ****PuNCTuJtion!!!!!!

It’s better to keep it simple. Only use one explanation point or question mark. DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPITOL LETTERS. It’s annoying and people don’t like it. As a general rule for punctuation, if you wouldn’t see it in a magazine or newspaper, you probably shouldn’t use it.

2. Long never ending articles that ramble on seeming to say nothing while never ending when they should but simply keep on going until the reader stops reading.

Hopefully it’s self-explanatory why you wouldn’t want this type of article. In addition to being a turn off in email marketing, it’s just bad writing. Any articles you include should have a point and get there quickly. You should also avoid long well written articles. Even if the article that doesn’t drivel on forever but is pointed and well written but happens to be long, an email newsletter is not the appropriate place for that article.

3. Unfamiliar From Addresses

Consumers look at who their emails are from before they decide whether or not to open them. When you send an email the recipients of that email should know exactly who is sending it.

4. Click Here Links

Don’t get us wrong, links are great and you should definitely incorporate them into your email newsletters. But when you provide a link make sure your reader knows what you are linking them to. Don’t say click here. If you are linking them to a video say: check out this video for more information. It doesn’t take much, just something simple to give the reader an idea of what they’ll be getting when they click the link.

5. Distracting Images

Many readers focus on the images first. So make sure your images help to tell the story of your email not hinder it. Include images but only images that are at least somewhat relevant to your email.

6. Boring Subject Lines

Spend a lot of time coming up with the perfect subject line. If you’re having a sale don’t say: We’re having a sale. Be creative and capture your reader’s attention in the subject line.

7. Unfamiliar Advertising

Having ads is fine, but make sure that they don’t take up more than about 20% of your email and that they are at least tangentially related to your audience.