This email starts off great. The first thing it does is let you know why you’re getting it and how to stop getting the emails if you’ve changed your mind.  They understand that if people don’t want to be on your list, then you don’t want them on your list either.  Moving on to the email itself, they’ve made an appropriately short pitch of the product they are promoting (in this case, summer cocktails) and they link directly to a menu that lists all the cocktails available as well as their prices.  It’s short, to the point, and gets the message across.

They also get bonus points for including some editorial (non-sales) information.  They’ve linked up two videos that show you how to make a few summer cocktails yourself.  It’s always good to include some free information if it is of actual interest to your list.

I only have two complaints:

1. They haven’t included any method of tracking results. Just to be clear, you don’t have to offer free stuff for every single email… but it’s good to do so occasionally for two reasons. First, it will allow you to track how successful your email campaigns are, and  secondly it gives people a reason to allow you to continue to send them email. If you only every send ads and never send any bonuses, you’ll lose subscribers.

2. There is no social media linked from the email (Twitter / Facebook) — however, a brief search showed me that as of the date of this post, they don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account, so that’s a problem that goes a bit beyond Email Marketing.

So, a much better example this time around! Next time, hopefully we can find an email piece that does everything (or almost) everything right!

Personal Relationship Emails

These are a bit different than the other forms of email newsletters we’ve discussed, as they are created to send a personalized message to a specific recipient when a set of requirements are met. For example, let’s take a high end restaurant. Mr. Smith has taken his wife to dinner as part of an evening out, and they had a pleasant experience. While signing the bill, he notices there’s a field asking for his email address and he decides to fill it out. Mr. and Mrs. Smith go home and forget about the great experience they had and move on with their lives. However, 48 hours later an email lands in Mr. Smith’s inbox from the restaurant. To him, it reads as if someone has taken the time to send him an email personally:

Dear Mr. Smith,

We wanted to send you a quick note thanking you for having dinner at our fine establishment the other night. We trust your experience was enjoyable. If there were any concerns that were not met during your meal, please feel free to contact me directly (my contact information is below) and I will do my best to help you out.

As a token of our appreciation, please accept this 15% off coupon (alcoholic beverages excluded) for your next visit to our fine establishment, and we hope you will keep us in mind the next time you decide to go out for dinner.

Sincerely,
Jim Johnson
Manager

Consider the impression that this will have on the average consumer. Not only will Mr. Smith be impressed by the fact that the restaurant took the time to send him an email about his experience directly, but there is a good chance he will make plans to have dinner there again within the month to take advantage of the 15% discount he’s been offered. Now writing an email to every single patron may seem like a significant amount of time invested, but the beauty of this type of email marketing is it can be mostly automated. With the entry of a few pieces of information, the system can automatically generate this email and keep emailing Mr. Smith every 6 months with a new offer to make sure he doesn’t forget to go out for dinner at his favorite restaurant.

Hopefully our outline of some of the major types of email communication you can send from an email marketing campaign will be helpful for your business as you branch out into email marketing, and be sure you don’t miss our future posts on this topic that will help you grow your business through the power of the Internet!

Email Newsletters

This type of email is a bit more complicated and takes more time and effort to create and send than previous forms of email, but it can really help build a relationship with your customers. It also can help your establish you or your business as an expert in your field. Due to their size and complexity, you usually won’t send out a full email newsletter more than once a month, which makes it easier to assemble all the information required to put a good email newsletter together.

First and foremost, you’ll want to keep in mind that an e-newsletter is going to be mostly editorial content and very light on actually advertising (the lighter the better). You should be aiming for about 80% editorial content and 20% advertising, or even 90% – 10% if you can. Essentially the bulk of the newsletter will be made up of informative articles, case studies and tips that will be helpful to your prospects and customers. This will help establish you as a trusted and knowledgeable source in your field. Why is this beneficial? Think about it, who would you rather hire or purchase from: Someone who is a knowledgeable and respected expert on the product or service you require, or someone who you have never heard of and may or may not know anything about the product or service you’re purchasing?

You’ll want to send this email out regularly, quarterly at the very least… but as mentioned before you won’t want to send it out more than once a month. Email newsletters tend to be larger and require time to go through, and recipients on your list will not want to spend the time required to go through the newsletter more than once a month. This type of email can be great for businesses who have a subscription model; your regular newsletter can remind your customers of the value you provide to them and make them more likely to renew when their subscription is due.  Businesses (like Lifeline) who typically have a larger value product and a longer sales process can benefit greatly from email newsletters too, because their regular emails can help reinforce the quality of the solution that your company is providing to prospects as well as keep your business name fresh in their minds.

Well, originally this was supposed to only be a two part series, but it turns out there is just far too much to say about the two other types of email marketing.  So make sure you don’t miss tomorrow’s final post (for the real this time I promise)  where we’ll be discussing a powerful form of email marketing called Personal Relationship Emails.

Postcard Emails:

The idea behind a postcard email is to get your point across quickly. You’ll want the entire email to be visible without scrolling, and these will typically include more graphics than other email marketing types.  The idea is for the email is to make one or maybe two offers to the recipient and make sure they can see and understand those offers as quickly as possible.  It is important that the text you place into your postcard email is snappy and to the point.  It’s also important that the offer(s) you are making will be enticing to your list. Otherwise you may end up with postcard emails that leave your recipients scratching their heads, like Montana’s did.

Recipients often prefer postcard emails over other forms of marketing email because they are short and don’t take a lot of time to read.  From your perspective they are also easier to produce and send,  but you’re only able to promote one or two products or services in a postcard email, so depending on your goals it may not be the best bet.  One of the best uses of this type of email is for retail / consumer driven businesses who can offer promotions to get customers in the door.

Email Catalogs:

The name of this type of email is pretty indicative of what it is: essentially it’s a product or service catalog sent via email.  These are almost always longer than the postcard type of email.  Email catalogs are usually used by businesses who have an online store.  If you have ecommerce, you can link the products in your email catalog right to your website where the user can make a purchase if they are interested.

You need to be careful about how much is included via your catalog emails — if there is too much to download you may run into users giving up on the email before it downloads completely. For an ecommerce application, you’ll want to highlight a handful of products that are either very popular or on sale. If the products  are popular AND on sale you’ll do even better as you are giving recipients more reasons to buy.  If your goal is to have recipients click through to your website and purchase a product, then it’s obviously very important that each product is linked to the product page.

An alternate use for email catalogs is for businesses who have a large product catalog that they send out via print quarterly or twice a year. If you have customers who will agree to receive this catalog via email, you can send an email catalog when your print catalog updates and link the recipient to a PDF download of your full catalog. This will save significant amounts of print costs.

Hopefully you enjoyed part one of this email marketing type overview. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post where we’ll go over email newsletters and personal relationship emails.

Let’s take a look at the emails, and where they went wrong, in order to help you avoid making similar mistakes in your own campaigns:

Email Number One:

This first attempt is not too bad. It focuses on one offer, includes some mouth-watering imagery… if you’re the type of person who likes ribs.  They are missing the full potential possible here though: the biggest issue is the lack of price being displayed. The common gut reaction when you see an advertisement like this without a price is “this must be very expensive, and they just want to get me in the door before telling me how much it will really cost.”  It’s unfortunate, because while ribs aren’t typically cheap fare, Montana’s is only charging a dollar or so more than their regular single order price for all-you-can-eat ribs. Not only are they missing out on a great selling feature, but they may be turning some customers off who are skeptical because there isn’t a posted price.

The second issue is there is no method of tracking how well this email promotion did for them versus the other advertising they’ve done. While  Email Marketing is much more cost effective that more traditional forms of marketing, there is still a cost to it, so it’s important to know if you’re making money, breaking even, or losing money.  An easy way to track this is to include a coupon with the email.  In this case, preferably something that is relatively inexpensive for the restaurant to provide but will add incentive to come visit the restaurant.  A free drink may be a good offer, since it costs pennies on the glass, but the chain may not want to use a free drink since it’s an easy form of revenue.  Nevertheless, offering some sort of coupon that can be tracked could give  some exact numbers on how many patrons came in because of the campaign, and that information is very valuable.

Email Number Two:

This email corrects the tracking issue of the previous mail broadcast, assuming this is the only method through which they’re promoting the free deck of cards offer. Count up how many decks of cards have been sent out and  you have a pretty good idea of how many people this ad brought in. The issue with this email is the offer itself… it’s a bit of a head scratcher.  Purchasing a kid’s meal gives you a free deck of cards, which is not really an age appropriate freebie!  Why not offer something that makes more sense to a kid, like a Montana’s themed toy?  Or if you’re dead set on the deck of cards, why not make them free with the purchase of some specific regular meal instead of the kid’s meal?

The offer you make with your email needs to be compelling and logical; you don’t want to confuse your market or provide a gift that’s not age appropriate to the offer.

This concludes our first Email Marketing critique, if you’d like to have us provide insight and advice on one of your email marketing campaigns for free, contact us by clicking here.

Essentially, permission based marketing is any form of marketing where the consumer has specifically requested to receive or be contacted by you for marketing purposes. This is tied to e-mail marketing closely because you’ll usually be sending e-mail to potential customers who’ve requested (or opted in, to use an industry term) to receive marketing e-mails from your company.  Now initially I’m sure it seems counter-intuitive to bother with the hassles of getting potential customers to request e-mail marketing from your company, but there are a lot of very good reasons you should go through this extra effort, and here’s just a few of the many reasons why:

1.  SPAM

Yup, we might as well start with the biggest reason you’ll want to get permission before sending marketing e-mails out.  As a regular user receiving spam on a regular basis, it may seem that spammers simply get to send out massive amounts of e-mail without any consequences… but in actuality, spammers play a constant cat and mouse game with system administrators, setting up new servers and finding new places to send spam from as their old servers become blocked.  That’s right, there are a host of technical issues that you will have to deal with if your e-mail marketing efforts receive too many spam complains.

First of all, many hosting providers (like us for example) will suspend and cancel the hosting accounts of any domain that has been flagged as being advertised in spam emails.  Your e-mail provider may also cancel your account if you are reported for spamming or your mailservers could become blacklisted, which essentially means most people won’t receive any mail from you, let alone your marketing e-mails.

In addition to all those technical issues you’ll have to deal with, many countries have now enacted anti-spam legislation, and if you are reported for spamming you may even face legal issues depending on the laws where you live.

2. Trust

One of the primary reasons that permission marketing has become such a popular idea in the marketing community is because traditional forms of marketing are simply not working. To a certain extent, sales has always been about building a relationship with the customer.  Convincing the customer to request your marketing information is not only the first step in building that relationship. E-mail is a much easier method of building relationships with your customer than traditional forms such as expensive mailings and time consuming phone calls.

3. Cost Effectiveness

Even though e-mail marketing is already a very cost effective marketing method, wasted money is still wasted money. When you don’t have explicit permission to send your marketing message to a potential customer, you have no idea if they will have any interest in what you sell. Most or all of your e-mail list may have absolutely no interest in your product or service and then you’ve just wasted time and money to advertise to the wrong target market. Conversely, if your list is built with explicit permission (users have opted in to receive your message) then you can be sure that everyone on your list has at least some interest in what you sell.

So all that is well and good, but I know what you’re thinking. “How do I get someone to actually ask for marketing materials from me?” Well, don’t worry, because next we’ll be talking about the different types of marketing e-mails and their uses as well as ways you can grow your subscriber list.  Stay tuned!

Single Opt in and Double Opt in: These terms are both related to someone requesting to be added to your mailing list.  When a user enters their email address to be added to your list and they are immediately added, this is considered a “Single Opt in”, whereas if they enter their email address to be added to your mailing list, but are then sent an email asking them to click on a link to confirm they would like to join your mailing list it is considered a “Double Opt in”.  Double Opt in is considered a superior and safer method of building your email list, as it requires the user to confirm they want to join your mailing list, whereas with a single Opt-in, a malicious user or competitor could conceivably add 100’s of people to your mailing list without their (or your!) knowledge.

Above the fold: This is an old print term describing the information showing on the top half of a newspaper when it’s folded in half. This is the most important part of the paper and contains headlines along with anything else that will convince the consumer to buy it.  In the digital age,  above the fold has come to describe what’s visible on a webpage without scrolling, and more recently the part of your marketing e-mail that is viewable in a email program’s preview pane without requiring the user to scroll down.  Because of web resolutions, the above the fold line is constantly shifting and changing… and email clients make it even harder to predict where the above the fold line will be. However, it’s important to keep this in mind because typically your “above the fold” information is what will convince your reader to open your email and read what’s involved in it.

Email Service Provider: A company that has a large number of servers setup specifically to send email. Typically they will have established many relationships with various service providers on the Internet to ensure high deliverability of emails.  Sending email newsletters through your desktop mail client can become problematic especially as your list grows; you may begin to have issues with emails being filtered out because of the quantity of mail being sent. In addition, Email Service Providers or ESP’s can provide a wealth of other benefits, such as easy list segmenting and tracking of open rates / click throughs of the users that receive your emails.

Metrics and Conversion: Just like any other marketing campaign, it’s important to know if you are turning a profit or not. Tracking your cost / versus how many emails you send out and how many sales you make per email broadcast will help you determine if you’re making a profit on your e-mail marketing — and show you what needs to be improved if you’re not.

Hopefully you found this useful, as we learn more about e-mail marketing we’ll periodically review industry terms to help make this learning process easier!

All businesses can benefit from an email campaign.  Over the next few weeks we’ll examine the different types of marketing emails you can send out and what situations you would want to use them in, but for today, let’s talk about a few reasons why you would want to market through email.

1. Email is Cost Effective

Compared to traditional advertising  like radio, television or print, email advertising costs are minimal.  Smaller lists can be emailed directly from a mail client, but even as your list grows, a subscription to a service for email marketing is relatively inexpensive. In addition, email marketing is typically much more targeted than traditional forms of advertising. Instead of an ad that goes out in a newspaper to tens of thousands of people who likely have little to no interest in your products or services, you can ensure that everyone on your email list has requested to be there, and therefore they are interested in what you  have to say.

2. Email Builds Relationships

It’s no secret that building a relationship with your customer base can benefit your business in the long run. Email can be used to keep in regular contact with both your existing customers and potential prospects. Not only is it convenient for both parties involved, but it can save a lot of time and money that would normally be spent on phone calls and mailers sent out to achieve the same purpose.  Depending on your customer base, it may not be appropriate to use email as the sole means of building relationships with your customers, but it can enhance your existing activities… and some communication is always better than none!

3. Email is the Easiest Way to Sell to Your Existing Customers

It’s always easier to sell to existing customers rather than a new one.  If you’re sending regular information and updates to existing customers via email, that is the perfect place to introduce new products and services that may be of interest to them.  Once again, this can save time and money over the traditional method of contacting your customer base by phone or ground mail.

4. Email Gives You More Information

Email marketing campaigns can provide a wealth of information beyond traditional forms of advertising, particularly if you use an email newsletter application. Through these, you can tell how many of your emails have been delivered, the number of times it was opened by recipients, and even how many users clicked through from your email to your website.  You can even set up special pages on your website to allow you to track how many people click through from your email and buy a product or contact you for a quote.  Email tracking information isn’t 100% accurate, but it’s far superior to traditional forms of advertising where you often have to go on perceived changes in business, i.e. “well, it seemed like we had more customer inquiries during our radio campaign”.

5. Email Puts Segmentation and Targeting in Reach

Traditionally, it has been only large companies with significant marketing budgets who had the resources and market to segment their advertisements and test their effectiveness.  Modern email marketing software makes it easy for anyone to split their email list into different segments. This allows you to target your emails to specific groups based on their wants and needs, or broadcast an email to your entire list.

If you are not currently employing email marketing, but would like to find out more about it, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We’d be happy to provide a free consultation.