Ours is a small retail operation (10 stores, online store and 20 employees at head office) with a sales and marketing team of 3 people. Lately our traditional direct marketing efforts aren’t working. Do you think we should try emailing our customers sales announcements instead of mailing them?

Dwindling Response,
Winnipeg, Mb

A: Dear Dwindling,

I’m sorry, did I hear you correctly? Have you just emerged from a time warp? You might as well ask me if you ought to trade in your trusty old “Selectric” typewriter for a fancy new desktop computer.

By all means start an email loyalty and retention program. Yesterday if you can. Preferably sooner. But no, don’t simply spam them with a relentless stream of sales announcements and offers. If you’re going to get results, you need to provide value for your customers.

If you’ve done your homework, it shouldn’t be hard to figure out what information is both relevant to your customers and provides you with an opportunity to reinforce the value of your products and services.

Once your customers are used to receiving value in every email from you, they’ll be more inclined to open those promotional offers that you do send - whether they arrive in an inbox or a mailbox.

And, hey, when you’re ready to dump that old typewriter, give me a call. I’ve got a sweet little Atari gathering dust in a closet that you can have for a song.

Aunt May

Every time I speak to a group about email marketing, they’re inordinately interested in how to measure success. And inevitably, success is measured by how well (or how poorly) their open rates and CTRs stack up against “industry average”.

Industry average success metrics are irrelevant to the success (or failure) of your email marketing programs. After the first mailing, you can often ignore them save perhaps a bi-annual visit to your favourite metrics site for the sake of curiosity and benchmarking.

Why?

In reality, the statistics vary widely by industry sector, time of year, and reporting company, among other factors. For example, DoubleClick’s quarterly email trend reports consistently cite open rates in the 38% range, and clickthrough rates hovering around 8%. Competitor Bigfoot Interactive reports open rates as low as 28% but claims CTR’s that range from 4% to 22%!

Read More…

I’ve been watching the evolution of GMail with great interest. Not only because as an email marketer, I need to be able to guide clients on how to adapt their email programs to accommodate GMail’s restrictions - the most immediately challenging being GMail’s handling of graphics, forwards and spam. But that’s another post…

You see, those are really technical issues. They’re easily addressed and it’s my job to address them. We already have strategies in place for our clients, and are working hard to ensure all of our work is “GMail friendly” now.

Nope, it’s the whole contextual ads and privacy debate that has me… well, frankly, spooked.

In reality, GMail advertising isn’t much different from the personalization features employed by many online retailers. Serve up information that’s contextually relevant to what the visitor is already interested in. Email programs already scan content to provide spam filtering and virus checking, among other services. According to Google, this makes it ok because it’s already happening somewhere else.

Let’s conveniently ignore the fact that what the visitor is looking at is a private conversation.

Read More…

A few weeks ago, I posted something of a rant about customer service after a less than promising experience with technical support for a contact management solution we use. Today I received a letter from that company.

“Wow!” I thought. “Maybe they heard the tape and are following up to rectify the damage…”

Wishful thinking!

Here’s the actual text from this letter. No kidding - this brilliant piece of warm and fuzzy communication is the brainchild of the marketing director for a multi-national software company:

Dear customer,

We are writing to inform you that as of October 1, 2004 we will no longer offer ***** upgrades. While you can continue to use ***** with your 2004 accounting software it will not work with the new 2005 update.

If you have additional questions, please call Client Care at 1-800-773-****.

Sincerely,

*****
Director, Small Business Marketing

Read More…

I’ve just noticed the date.

Not long ago, I published an ePinions article about the abuse of 9/11 by the marketing world. And yet here I am, talking about it in a marketing blog.

No opinions, no pithy words here though. Just a moment of silence and rememberance for the shock and horror I awoke to 24 months ago today.