Make E-Mail Marketing Work for You
March 15, 04
By Edahn Golan
A recent study says that 86 percent of e-tailers found that e-mail marketing was the most successful promotion tool this past holiday season. More than search engine marketing, offline coupons or even magazine ads!
This means that if you have a website selling diamond jewelry, chances are that to get the most bang for your buck, reaching out to your customers and potential costumers with an email campaign or a newsletter would be wise. Shop.org and BizRate.com, which conducted the study between December 29 and 30 of more than 80 online retailers, also found that among 48% of them their e-mail open rates during the holiday season did not change, with only 2% saying open rates significantly improved.
Now that the ‘Why’ on email campaigns is clear, onward to the ‘How’. There is, of course, more than one way to do well, but some principles should be kept in mind. At the top of the list you should place technical coherency. Nothing can sink a campaign like an ill-formatted and unreadable email.
Setting tech issues aside, consider the following:
• Brand - fostering your brand is paramount and should be applied to the entire email, starting with a clear logo located at the top of the email, followed by your brand’s color scheme and a layout that should be consistent throughout, especially over the course of time if you plan a periodic newsletter or additional campaigns.
• Useful content - Your emails have to give something to the recipient. Giving the impression that you just want something from them is a turnoff. Giving is a great lure and can include specials, coupons and engaging content. This content can be relevant news or a picture of a
• Leave me alone - Don’t forget to give your recipients an option to unsubscribe from your mailing list.
• Call for action - Get them doing... something. Seriously. Place a survey or a poll that will give you some market data. Again, be creative.
Talking of action, how about an online game? Sounds silly, maybe inappropriate for a luxury item, but consider what under-garment maker Jockey did this past December to complement its site’s direct mail holiday campaign. It sponsored “Make-A-Flake” (http://snowflakes.lookandfeel.com), an interactive online snowflake maker. The snowflake maker visitors could create their own virtual paper snow-flakes and save them to an online gallery, the snowflakes could be shared via email, allowing a viral component to the program.
Viral marketing has long been coveted for its ability to increase visibility and boost interaction with online contests and promotions. By the end of December, the site generated over 1.8 million snowflakes created by people all over the world with 17.4 million page views. None of us would mind that kind of attention, would we?
But how does this help us? It’s called Associative Advertising. Jockey.com's sponsorship of the application gave Jockey a place to post its logo, along with a special offer for free ground shipping on purchases at Jockey.com when customers referenced the Make-A-Flake promotional code.
Simple, brilliant, and very effective positive branding. To sweeten the punch line, allow me to intimate that Jockey didn’t buy any outside media to promote the program. They simply sent two emails to about 1,500 names on their own mailing list to announce it. Word of mouth did the rest.
One last comment: The new CAN-SPAM Act requires that all marketing emails include an actual working postal address so recipients can have their names removed from the marketer’s emailing lists. It’s not just the law, it also gives the email recipients a more secure feeling that you are a serious, bona fide business.