E-Mail Marketing - Modern Retail Archive

E-Mail Marketing Category

Marketing is Time, Money and Desire

March 22nd, 2013 by Todd Myers

When talking with retailers they often ask for advice around marketing and developing a marketing plan. However, I find it impossible to give any advice until I listen to the retailers and get a better understanding of three important factors: time, money and desire.

The hard truth of online marketing for specialty retailers is there is no silver bullet and one-size certainly does not fit all. Over the years I’ve found people approach online marketing very differently. Some people understand a certain cost exists to “acquire” online customers, while others refuse to spend a dime on marketing. Some people are creative and love to write, while others prefer to crunch the numbers. Some people are extremely social, while others like to run their business and the back-office. Getting an understanding of how a retailer’s mind works allows me to craft a marketing plan that’s a perfect fit for that specific retailer.

Time

Let’s face it, online marketing takes time. However, there are certain marketing initiatives that take less time than others. If a retailer has very little time for marketing, I’ll typically recommend they do paid advertising or online marketplaces. Paid advertising includes sites like Google AdWords, AdRoll and Amazon Product Ads, while online marketplaces include sites like Google Products, Commission Junction, PepperJam and selling on Amazon. While both paid advertising and marketplaces take time to setup and some on-going maintenance, they generally take less time than other initiatives.

Side Note: TheFind.com is a free marketplace and you should definitely send your catalog to them if you have an online store.

I know this is a bit of an oxymoron, but for those retailers who have extra time on their hands, we typically recommend a completely different set of activities. These activities are usually centered around search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. Explaining SEO is beyond the scope of this article but I encourage you to read my article about Search Engine Optimization for Retailers. However, suffice it to say if you like to write, you have a huge leg up when it comes to SEO. Likewise if you have the time to share and interact with people, then social media sites like Facebook, Wanelo, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. will be more to your liking.

Money

The second factor I try to understand from my customers is how they feel about spending money on online advertising. I’ve been doing this since 1998 and I’ll tell you, I’ve run into some retailers with some very strong opinions about spending money on online marketing. I’ve encountered everything from “it will be a cold day in hell” before I spend anything on online marketing to stores with huge budgets and rather large marketing departments. However, for me it’s not how much you spend, but rather are you returning your investment?

I suspect very few of you can simply throw money at marketing and hope something sticks. Instead, your online marketing efforts can be measured and in most cases you can prove how much you’ve made on your marketing initiatives. It is a much easier “sell” when you can show people how much they made with their marketing initiatives.

For example, would you be willing to spent $100 to make $1000? For many retailers the answer is yes because to them it is like giving the consumer a 10% off coupon. This fee is what it takes to acquire this customer online or as I like to say, your acquisition cost. Getting retailers to understand this idea is admittedly difficult, but once I do, a few marketing doors open up to them including email marketing, paid advertising and marketplaces. I have even seen some retailers pay outside SEO firms, and over time, have returned favorable returns on their investment.

Shameless Promotion: Modern Retail includes email marketing and marketplace feeds at no extra charge with most of our packages and services because these activities drive traffic and sales; ultimately leading to the success of both our clients and Modern Retail.

Desire

Finally, I like to figure out a retailer’s desires when it comes to online marketing. Some people are left-brained, while others are right-brained, and I need to understand where their interests lie in order to put together a solid marketing plan. Some people have nightmares about their junior high math teacher and simply refuse to do anything that has to do with numbers. For those people something like Google AdWords may not make sense. Others love to talk and socialize, so making relationships with people through sites such as Facebook, Pinterest and Wanelo is a no-brainer.

The challenge here is to understand the wants, needs and interests of everyone involved in your website project and “slot” them into the appropriate area and marketing initiative. The last thing you want to do is ask someone to do something they absolutely hate doing. Instead, it’s far better to understand the strength of your team members and what they like to do and cut them loose.

So when you’re putting together your marketing plan, look closely at how much time and money you want to spend as well as where your interest lies. Also consider the interests of your team as they will likely be able to assist in your efforts. There are a lot of options for you, so pick what works right for your business.

Are Your Customers Receiving Your Emails? How to Avoid Being Flagged as Spam.

February 6th, 2013 by Tari Fraim

As a retailer, you want to keep in touch with your customers on a regular basis. You take the time to collect their email addresses when they check-out in your store. You give them an option to sign up for your emails on your website. Next you take the time to create a dazzling email announcing your latest sale or newest product arrivals and you hit “send.” How many customers are actually receiving your emails?

In a recent article in the Economist, they cite that the percentage of emails that are considered spam is at about 67%. While that number has dropped in recent years and continues the downward trend, that’s still a lot of customers who might not be receiving your carefully crafted email campaigns.

Why Your Emails Go To Spam-Land

Before you come up with a strategy to ensure you customers are receiving your emails, you need to understand why they’re not. There are a lot of different spam filters and each has slightly different criteria that will throw your email into the spam or junk-mail folder. Incoming mail receives a score for each offense and once the spam threshold is reached, there goes your email. Some of the common mistakes that will get your email flagged as spam include:

Spammy words or phrases in the subject line or email body – words like “Free” or “Guaranteed,” especially in phrases like “free offer,” or even something like “supplies are limited” are a sure way to get tossed into the spam folder. If that doesn’t sound like a sales pitch, what does? Put those words in all caps and you’re sure to get booted!
Using all CAPS, fonts in different colors, large sizes or exclamation marks!!!!! – Using all caps or exclamation marks is like shouting in email. Who wants that?
Using “gappy” text to try to fool spam filters – F.r.e.e. is still Free in the eyes of a spam filter.
Too high a picture to text ratio – filters typically measure the ratio of text and images. Send an email with one big image and no text, the filter thinks you’re trying to get people to link to something they shouldn’t.
Sloppy HTML Coding – Be careful about cutting and pasting from Word; sloppy coding makes your email look unprofessional and more likely to get flagged.

There are many more ways to get marked as spam depending on the email filter that’s being used. Each filter is slightly different. But the one thing they do have in common is that they are all getting smarter.

How to Improve Your Email Success

So now that you know some things not to do in your emails, here are some things you can do to improve your chances of getting through to your customer.

Create your emails and subject lines with careful thought to your content. Avoid those spammy words and phrases.
Balance the amount of text with the images.
Send both HTML & plain text options. Remember, if the recipient disables images, all they will see is a blank page.
Use a “Double Opt-In” method – If a client signs up to be on your email list online, send them an email asking them to click on a link to confirm they want to receive your emails. If they click on the link, you now have proof that you have permission. If not, they don’t get added to the list.
Make sure your email looks professional and is free of typos. If your email doesn’t look professional, people aren’t going to trust your links.
Send your first email (often a “Welcome” email) very soon after the client subscribes. Wait too long and they may forget that they subscribed.
Send your emails on a regular basis. You have to find the balance between too little (risk that clients forget they subscribed) and too much (you overwhelm your customer). Let them know up front what they can expect.

Email marketing is a cost-effective, easy way to stay in touch with your customers and keep your business at their top-of-mind awareness. Of course, it’s only effective if they’re reading your emails and that can only happen if they receive them. Do your best to keep your email marketing campaigns compelling, yet low on the spam scale, and you’re sure to see a high return.

Email Marketing: Simple Rules for Success

October 12th, 2012 by Todd Myers

While our business is building e-commerce sites for specialty retailers, we’ve prided ourselves on the fact that we don’t stop there. We make it our business to understand all aspects of the retail world, from soup to nuts. One area that has been a challenge for our retailers is email marketing. Unlike many of the big-boxed retailers, our retailers often don’t have the budget to hire someone to focus solely on their marketing efforts. They often have to find the time and come up with content on their own – while running their business at the same time.

For years we have been teaching our clients how to send effective email marketing campaigns and below we’ve compiled a list of simple rules for success.

Content

The first question to ask yourself is, “What do I include in my email message?” Let’s get this out of the way immediately; I’ve found that it is generally a mistake for specialty retailers to offer a promotion or sale in every email campaign. Yes, including a coupon in your emails is a great way to increase your sales, but you need to be careful not to get carried away because it can be as addictive as crack. While you will see a nice bump in sales in the short-term, consumers quickly learn to wait for your next coupon before making their next purchase, which of course impacts your long-term profitability. Instead, our customers have found more success in spreading out promotions and making them random and unexpected.

Conversations with my clients always seem to go the same way at this point – they often seem at a loss because they feel like they have nothing to say or write about. This amazes me because we have great clients selling interesting and unique products. To get their creative juices going, I usually tell them a story about one of my clients who sent out a mailer about carving pumpkins. On the surface you might ask, “What does carving pumpkins have to do with selling goods online?” Everything! Not only did his customers absolutely love this mailer but it was a perfect fit with his business – housewares. The mailer was original, cute and showed off the personality of the owners; something that big-boxed retailers can rarely accomplish!

Next, I simply ask my clients about their products, brands or what they think the big trend will be this season. They have no problem answering these questions and they often glow as they talk about their designers and what they think will be hot this season. I sit back and listen and when they finally stop talking, I tell them they have just written a half dozen mailers. Really? Yes, really! Consumers are interested in knowing what you think, so use these emails to create a connection them!

Frequency

For most retailers you can send out a mailer every week or every other week. We do have stores that are successful sending out emails multiple times per week, but you need to be sure it fits your demographic. In general, these clients usually have a younger customer base or sell products that are very trendy. If you fall outside of these criteria, then stick to every week or every other week – and if you follow the tips above, you’ll have plenty to write about.

Consistency

I always advise my customers to be consistent with their mailers. Pick a day you want to send out your emails and stick to it. Yes, you can always send a special email right before, say Mother’s Day, but I would much rather see our clients send out an email on the exact same day and time. Why? Because the biggest problem with retailers, is well, retailers. Given their hectic schedules, it is easy to get distracted and the next thing you know, two months have gone by and no mailer has been sent. Instead, put it on the calendar and make sure it happens. You may want to write your next email campaign ahead of the due date so you don’t run out of time or get flustered thinking you have nothing to write about on the day it’s due.

Meaning

Every single email you send out needs to be meaningful. Sending out emails without a clear message or meaning is frankly just wasting everyone’s time. I tell customers this all the time, but you’d be surprised how often emails are sent out with nothing more than a line of text, some products and really nothing of substance. Sometimes it’s hard to know what they are trying to say or promote. The take-away here: be thoughtful with your mailers and make sure your message is clear and understandable.

Format

I recommend you stick to very simple HTML in your mailers and include at least a paragraph of text. If you follow these two simple rules your emails will have a far greater chance of making it past the various spam engines and into your customer’s inbox.

Test

Finally, I suspect every email marketing program on the planet gives you the ability to test your mailer. Please use this feature to make sure your email looks great. Be especially careful with your spelling and grammar. One trick here is to read your mailer backwards, you’ll be surprised how many mistakes you’ll find.

Following these simple rules should help you improve your email marketing campaigns and in turn, your bottom line! And remember, as a specialty retailer, your size is not a liability, it’s an asset – relish in your uniqueness and creativity – and use that to send effective, successful email marketing campaigns.

SendGrid: Revolutionizing Email Delivery

August 15th, 2012 by Roy Plum

Since 1998 we’ve sent email from our application using our own, very reliable, SMTP servers. And while it has worked great, it is nowhere near as robust as SendGrid, a cloud-based email delivery and management service whose goal is to increase delivery and improve customer communications.

SendGrid has revolutionized the delivery of email from our applications because it allows us to know what happens to each and every email that leaves us. Was the message undeliverable because the email address was invalid? Did it bounce for some reason? Did the consumer mark it as Spam? SendGrid will tell you this and much more about every message sent from your application.

SendGrid Analytics

SendGrid lets you know the status of your email as well as provides usable metrics that will help you improve your deliverability. More importantly, you can provide this information back to your users so they can improve the number of emails that are received by the recipient (instead of winding up in a Junk Mail folder) as well as know exactly what happened with an email when a customer calls asking for the status of their order.

You accomplish this by using SendGrid’s application programming interface (API). We found the API robust and easy to implement, and we were able to create a working prototype in just a few hours. Understanding what happens to a message when it leaves your application is important because many end users don’t understand the intricacies of email delivery and generally, don’t care. What they do care about is if the email reached the recipient and if it didn’t, why not – in plain, simple to understand terms. This is why we’re using the SendGrid API.

The actual delivery, or sending of messages, can be accomplished in a couple of ways. SendGrid allows you to send messages directly to their SMTP servers through their API. Calling their API in this manner enables your application to talk and send messages directly to an SMTP server, negating the need for you to even have an SMTP server on our side. This is probably the best and simplest configuration you can have. However, if you’re like us this may not be an option if you have a huge installed base of code which sends email through your own SMTP server. In this case, it is a simple matter of configuring your SMTP server to forward the email through SendGrid. Anyone familiar with SMTP should be able to make this change in minutes to your SMTP server.

Finally, here’s an important tip when implementing SendGrid. Remember to change the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records associated with your domains. The SPF is a validation system designed to prevent email spam and because you are sending your messages through SendGrid, these records will need to be updated.

Strong customer communication is vital to the success of any business whether you’re sending hundreds, thousands or millions of emails on a regular basis. Knowing exactly what happens to those emails when they leave your application is crucial to maintaining positive customer relationships and growing your business. We’ve found that SendGrid helps you get there with minimal pain and effort.

Email is Marketing: Using Your Email Address to Reinforce Your Store Brand

June 20th, 2012 by Todd Myers

As a business owner, if someone gave you the option to promote your brand daily with little or no extra cost or effort to you, would you do it? It’s surprising the number of retailers and other businesses who miss this opportunity every day by continuing to use free email services such as Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, or other similar providers for their primary email address. Every time you send an email or someone grabs your business card with your generic email address (ex. User.Name@gmail.com), you miss out on the opportunity to reinforce the brand that you have worked so hard to build. By simply using an email address with your store name (User.Name@YourRetailStore.com), you create a professional image and a name that your customers can remember.

There are a lot of reasons why people opt to stick with a generic email. We’ve heard it all before …” I love Gmail, I use a free account for personal use and my store’s address for business use, I’ve been using AOL for years and everyone knows this address, I don’t see the point in switching it, etc.” Even though we provide our clients with 10 or more of these email addresses as a part of our service, they often go unused. For as many reasons that are given for continuing to use generic emails, there are even more compelling reason to make the switch.

Keep it Professional

When you see a generic email like User.Name@gmail.com, what is your first impression of the business? Maybe someone just getting started. A small business. Perhaps not very professional. An email address that matches the store’s domain instills a sense of confidence in the retailer; it provides a sense of legitimacy.

I’m also not a fan of adding a signature on a free email account that links visitors back to your website. Call me old school, but I believe you present a more professional front when both your email address and website link come from the same address. You don’t give out your personal home address and send all the mail from your store there do you? Why would you do the same thing with email?

Building Relationships is Personal

Like some people, you may prefer to keep your business and personal email addresses separate. Let me tell you a story about why you should reconsider. Only yesterday I was stopped on the street by someone who wants us to develop a website for his new bike shop. How did he find us? Not from Google. Not from our website. Not from some fancy brochure or marketing. Instead, he remembered we build websites from my email signature. His relationship with me is not professional, it’s personal. Our sons were in the same Cub Scout Troop a couple of years ago!

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing!

Email is marketing and it takes only minutes to add a signature to every email to constantly promote your business. Every time your customer sees your domain or store name to the right of the “@” symbol, that’s one more time for your name to be imprinted in their memory. If they go back to search through emails, will they remember how to find User.Name@gmail.com or will they remember to search for YourRetailStore.com?

If you absolutely can’t give up your free email account then at least configure it to pass email through your domain name. Many providers such as Google offer this as an option, and although a bit more to setup, people will see your store’s address even when using Gmail. This is great compromise – especially if you can’t live without your Google Docs and email.

So, if you already have your email address linked to your domain name, you’re on the right track for promoting your business and building your brand. If not, consider making the change because as a retailer, everything circles back to your business and you should be compelled to promote it at every turn. Make sure your email address is the same as your website address and always, always, always include a signature on every email message. You never know who might walk into your store because of it!

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