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.

Actually though, not such a tall order because there are certain things that these same clients are consistently not doing. Importantly these are generally not testing and/or measuring their promotional performances. This is a strategy that’s vital when a company doesn’t have a limitless budget.

It’s probably the most common failing with small businesses that they rush into using strategies for marketing and promoting their products and services without really knowing how successful they are being. It’s not an exacting science in terms of reallyknowing just which marketing method is going to work the best, therefore to limit the risk, it’s necessary to trial headlines, offers and action calls, so some patience is required because that means testing and measuring before the big push.

A good example of this came recently with a client who came to us when they had written their mail-shot and fulfilled it for 10,000 prospects and off it went only to get just 3 responses in total. A good rule of thumb is a 2-3% response rate (our latest general stats from the DMA are 2.61%) though certain industries and/or offers can vary dramatically.

Our strategy in this case is to trial three different service/product offers to three different market sectors each of 1000 prospects because your prospects will definitely let you know what they want and the offer that trials best will be sent to the main database.

By simply testing your offers you will reduce the risk of a poor response and feel much more confident with the main mailing also any follow up mailings will be based upon true research leaving you better prepared next time. This is a more cost-effective strategy giving you more bang for your bucks!

In closing, you really must ensure you ask for your responses too. Creating awareness is important but it’s lost if you don’t let your prospects know what is expected of them because this will be a crucial method of measuring how effective your final campaign is.

If you would like some help with your next direct mail campaigns or a critique of your sales letters, please feel free to contact us.

There can be few tools in your marketing kit that are as powerful as the Sales Letter.

That said, so many are written without sufficient regard to a persuasive call to action. It’s a shame because after all it’s how we motivate our reader to take the next step that’s the key to getting the response we required from our direct mail.

It’s crucial to keep in mind exactly what it is we want our reader to do. This is why it’s important to construct captivating offers that will trigger the prospect to move in the desired direction.

Wouldn’t it be great if a single unsolicited sales letter to a cold prospect galvanised them into picking up the phone and hiring you instantly? It happens but not to order.

Unfortunately, this is the biggest reason that people give for their sales letters not working; they often write one letter and give up. Only to be expected really!

What you need to realise is; it’s all about building relationships so we need to take things step by step. We need to build confidence in stages by and we do that by being less demanding in the beginning and by making a reasonable request that moves the relationship forward.

There’s always the possibility your sales letter will arrive at the desk of a prospect that’s in desperate need of your services but you can not build a firm marketing strategy around this kind of luck.

So what you’re aiming to begin with is a sales letter that intrigues your reader and to generate a level of curiosity that will be remembered when your follow-ups are received. Because in the early stages they will be wary of your sales pitch even despite being interested in your services.

At this stage of building your relationship the offer of Free Information is the perfect building block that generates confidence. So what they’re looking for here is some additional information, something interesting that supports your expertise such as your website, where your offer should be prominently displayed.

It’s at this stage you should be looking for opportunities to gain further contact points such as email addresses that can be fed into your system. This is key to your strategy because your services should be marketed within a system with each step of the process leading to sequential components that lead to an enquiry and ultimately to the meeting.

If you would like to discuss having this service working for you and put your products and services ahead of the competition, email us.