Email marketing campaigns are affordable, and can help small retailers to compete with the big boys during this essential sales period.

Retailers have to make certain that the programme will meet their defined objectives before launching any email marketing campaign.

It’s important to decide the key elements that will help their campaign stand out, what real value can be provided to their recipients – both prospects and customers. To be able to succeed in this, there needs to be combined features in evidence that cover both promotional and informational aspects of their marketing endeavour.

The programme needs to encourage a long a beneficial relationship as well as persuade the urgent purchase.

Hopefully these strategies will inspire an email campaign to engage your audience:

1. Don’t be too pushy: Loyalty is the name of the game so make sure your not pushing the ‘sale’ too hard. After all you want your customer to come back again not merely give you a quick sale. Gear your campaign to making sure your brand is kept in the audience’s awareness by creating a regular monthly or bi-monthly newsletter which has ideas and holiday offers that provide good value and not merely money off.
2. Ensure a well-rounded campaign: Make sure your promotions have all the relevant elements required to engage your prospects correctly. These are; describing your offer in the subject line, a powerful ‘call to action’, a clickable link or image that relates to your promotion and keep the text brief.
3. Extend your seasonal joy with your functioning messages: When informing your prospects and customers about operational happenings it’s in order to take the opportunity to softly promote yourself. Include mechanisms such as links to your website and/or blog or maybe a coupon or offer. Remember though, these messages aren’t principally marketing focused but a modest amount of branding is absolutely fine.
4. Choose the occasion not the day: There’s never a good or bad time to send email campaigns or best times either. So scheduling emails should relate to when your target audience are going to be more interested in their products and on the related special occasions. Your messages (and offers) need to relate to occasions like holidays, product launches even the seasonal climate or topical subjects and obviously sent in time to make sure they’re relevant.

If you need any help with ideas, planning and/or implementing your campaigns, why not contact us.

Traditional transactional marketing involved the organisation focusing all of its marketing efforts on attracting the customer for one off sales. However, customers who are loyal end up spending more in the long-term, so it makes sense to keep existing customers happy.

Attracting and retaining customers

Relationship marketing involves the organisation undertaking a number of important activities. First of all, the company must put into place tactics to attract customers. Methods used to attract customers may include promoting the product and brand, offering good quality products/services and competitive prices. Secondly customers that are attracted to the organisation have to be retained.

After all, what’s the point of all the hard work (and money) of attracting customers if you can’t retain them? Methods used to retain, may include, loyalty cards, a good customer service section, and an individual account manager if it is a large client, along with product variety and quality.

Methods of monitoring customer satisfaction

An organisation must continue to satisfy customers, but let’s be honest; it is very difficult to keep 100% of your customers satisfied all the time, one reason is because needs and wants of your customers change. So we have to monitor what is happening in our customer environment.

Methods used to monitor customer satisfaction may include:

• Focus groups
• General comments
• Online surveys
• Suggestion boxes
• Customer complaints
• Mystery Shoppers
• Questionnaires
• Personal interviews

In order to retain customers you must keep up to date with the needs of your customers.

Your customers needs don’t remain static either, they’re always changing. Adapting and changing along with these needs will help your organisation develop the relationship you want with your customers.

The benefits:

1. Increased profits
2. Increased market share
3. Increased brand awarenes

The more you focus on customers – their needs and desires – the more they’ll want to do business with you. Contact us to discuss some of the great cost-effective startegies we can introduce to grow your business.

As well as the legal constraints, think about your brand values and the demographics of your audience. In general, younger people are more comfortable with online approaches and may be willing to surrender personal information in return for incentives or services. Older prospects tend to be more likely to opt out – even from postal communication – so capturing their interest (and permission) can involve more cajoling.

Revisit permissions
Legacy data exists almost everywhere but how much of it is properly permissioned? It’s important to audit existing data and categorise it by reference to the consents you hold. In some cases, you may simply not know what options the individual received at the point of data capture. It may be necessary to‘re-permission’ this data by contacting the individuals afresh and asking them to confirm consents, usually an exercise that requires careful copywriting and some level of incentivising.

Always be friendly
Increasingly consumers judge brands on their handling of personal data; many will carefully select the companies they will allow to use their data. It is vital to adopt a customer friendly permission strategy which should be demonstrated at every point of data capture. Because of fears about identity theft, reassurance that data will be held securely and only used for specified purposes is likely to improve opt-in levels. Think, think, and think again.

Data protection statements (or Fair Processing Notices) need careful copywriting. Some common pitfalls when writing statements are: Specifying a single contact method when you want to use multiple channels. Limiting the frequency of contact for which you gain permission. For example, if you promise the individual ‘monthly updates’ they will not expect to receive fortnightly communications.- Collecting in the name of a single brand, which prevents use by other brands/companies in the group. – Not collecting third-party permission at the point of first collection. If you decide later that you want to release the data you will have to reapply for permission and generate a positive response. – Missing out some significant opportunities. For example, market research that will be personalised to an individual.

Research by Opt-4 (Source: The Opt-out Fallout, 2005) has suggested that statements which assume permission are generally disliked. Overly legalistic statements are also disliked. In general, using the brand ‘tone of voice’ in the statement will improve results. The law requires that the individual must be given an opportunity to object and a means to do so but – contrary to popular marketing belief – there is no specific mechanism by which this must be achieved.

Opt-out boxes have become the norm to facilitate the right to object because they are simple and well understood by the general public. Nearly 50% of consumers are aware of opt-out boxes according to research from the Direct Mail Information Service.

Provide incentives
Consumers need to see the value of giving you permission to use their data, so reminding them that they may miss out on special offers or money-off promotions can improve sign-up. Online this can be done by seeking registration for newsletters with tailored content; with careful wording, postal permission for general marketing can often be gained at the same time as sign up for a customer magazine.

Offering the individual channel options may also increase your permissions. Many more people object to telemarketing than to postal or email communications, so giving the consumer choice (rather than seeking global permissions) allows you to understand which channel ‘doors’ are likely to be open and which closed. You can improve response rates by playing to these channel preferences. Make sure your promises reflect your practices; the privacy policy you display online should encapsulate your permission values.

Make sure that the promises made in the privacy policy reflect your actual practices. There’s nothing worse than offering the consumer a choice, then ignoring their wishes. Preference management – especially if you are collecting permission by channel – requires complex database structures to be developed so you can keep your data accurate. Remember, legacy systems often have a single ‘do not mail’ field for suppression which will severely limit your ability to capture permissions.

Evaluate the impact
Gaining consent is just the start of the permission journey. The law says that the individual should be able to withdraw consent at any time. Nothing prompts disaffection more than over-mailing or sending irrelevant offers. Contacts with customers should be carefully controlled and the impact on the level of permissions evaluated after each campaign. Permission to market is a privilege not a right.

Article by Rosemary Smith, director of Opt-4 data protection consultancy, gives practical advice on how to obtain customer permissions.

Here is permission email marketing in its simplest form:

1. Permission email marketing begins with a decent software programme which will allow you to create your newsletters, manage your subscribers automatically and view your reporting statistics to check how well you’re doing and automatically deal with any un-subscribers or bounce-backs.

2. Next you need to consider how frequently you’ll be sending email and what type of announcements will be sent. Monthly is a good time frame and perhaps in the form of a newsletter which will allow you to include several subjects. You can mix it up with offers including vouchers, discounts etc.

3. You may already have your own list of email addresses. However, most decent programmes will insist on your list being completely ‘opt-in’. A good way to collect new subscribers for your newsletters and offers is by adding a sign-up device on your web site. This doesn’t exclude your current list; it merely means you will need to import them into the programme you’ve chosen to use which won’t be an issue if they’ve received relevant communications form you before or of course if they’re existing customers.

4. Whether to use HTML or plain text is a subject for another post. However, you will be able to generate your email template from a choice provided within your email marketing software or you could create your own or employ an external designer. Usually though, the software will come with plenty of options that are designed for use with that system.

5. Generating a steady supply of content is an important element of your email marketing. It needs to be relevant and interesting to hold your readers attention and hopefully lead to sales too. It’s essential that your offers, newsletters and other announcements are sent consistently and frequently enough not to be a nuisance. Once this is mastered, your subscribers will increase and so too will your sales.

The importance of providing valuable content can’t be stressed more. It’s important for keeping your products, services and brand name in front of your prospects and clients ensuring your relationship develops and you are in their minds when they are ready to purchase.

If you would like strong and relevant content for your permission email marketing programme, contact us.

Many businesses fall into the same trap with email marketing; it’s not merely a case of sending and an email to a list of targets and hope they will visit you or your website – great if it were.

Simply presenting your products or services even to targeted prospects is useless unless there’s a convincing motive for them to buy your offering right now. Without that reason, those prospects are in control of when they buy and if they don’t hear from you again – when they are eventually ready to purchase, you will be forgotten!

That leaves the important question to ponder – does your product or service present a compelling motive to purchase, now? Here’s where you need to be creative with your offer because generally many products and services will only sell to the right buyer at the right time.

So what’s required here is a structured programme of time-release emails or notices designed to keep your prospects interested and more importantly, engaged until they buy. A key element of this process is also to constantly and proactively prospecting for more future prospects.

Capturing your visitors email addresses requires you to also capture their attention and this requires an informative and well-designed website that instills trust which is fundamental to building customer confidence.

Methods employed for capturing email addresses need careful thought because your audience won’t be prepared to give your their email address lightly so make sure you give them value. If you can educate them they will be interested enough to return as long as the information is good. Also make sure you have an opt-in box on your website that offers them something of value in exchange for signing up.

Once you have your list you must schedule regular mailings and ensure they’re not too frequent or your contacts may opt-out again; once or twice a month is fine and a great offer here and there will hopefully get them back to your website often so ensure your site is kept fresh with interesting content that inspires and entertains.

But remember! Not to hide your sales message with your information. You must still make it easy for them to buy from you.

To get your email marketing strategy in place and increase your customer base, contact us today.