Tips for starting e-mail marketing

It’s a widely accepted business tenet that e-mail is the least expensive and fastest way to communicate with customers. The other benefits—tracking responses, testing marketing approaches and more—are sizable as well.

If you’re not yet e-mailing your customers, a likely reason is that you are not sure how to get started. MRA members who have been using e-mail for a few years to contact or market to customers can share some “getting started” tips.

Getting addresses
Peter Bowe, at Saline Picture Frame Co, has been collecting e-mail addresses informally at the store for several years and now has about 600 names. He maintains two separate lists—one for in-store customers who provide their address when a staff member asks for it, and one for customers who make an inquiry or purchase online through the store’s website.

“Keeping two lists allows us to target our message,” Bowe explained. “We don’t want to bother our online customers, who are from all over, with announcements of in-store events or sales that only affect in-store merchandise.”

His advice to those just getting started is to start collecting e-mail addresses in the store. Bowe and his staff simply ask customers if they would like to receive an occasional e-mail to update them on events and promotions at the store.

“You’d be surprised how many people are willing to provide it when asked, especially if they are regular customers,” he said. At this point not every customer gets asked, but he’s considering having a prompt for it come up on the register during the sale.

Some marketers will suggest that a business give customers a small thank-you for signing up—a coupon or perhaps a drawing among customers who have subscribed to the e-newsletter, to reward them for their time. Bowe believes this is a good idea.

Pam Semp, owner of The Corner Store in Harbor Beach, has a visitor’s guest book in the store, but very few people put their e-mail address on that form. However, members of the store’s various “clubs”—associated with various product lines she offers—are very willing to give an e-mail to stay updated on activities and products offered through the club.

Most of Semp’s e-mails come from the store’s website. A link on the home page invites people to subscribe. Also, when someone orders online, there’s an option in the checkout process to subscribe.

Bowe and all retailers contacted for this article advised against buying or renting lists of e-mail addresses. Today, concerns about spam have grown too large for bought or rented lists to be effective.

“If you buy addresses, the more likely response from people is ‘how did you get my e-mail’ rather than actual interest. Who needs that negative response?” said Bowe.

E-mail marketing tips for beginners

• Start collecting e-mails with a sign-up form in your store now.
• Don’t buy a list of e-mail addresses—that’s a good way to be viewed as a “spammer.”
• Make it straightforward and easy for the reader to be removed, and comply with requests promptly.
• Pace your e-mails carefully—no more than every three weeks for a small retailer (even if the nationals do it more often). But be consistent.
• Have something to say. Along with brief announcements of promos or sales, include useful information.
• Be succinct. Once your message gets opened, get to your point quickly. Don’t test your reader’s patience.
• Get ideas from other stores’ e-mails. What elements get your positive attention? Can you adapt those elements for your messages?

What to say?
Now that you’ve got these e-mail addresses, what do you put in your messages? Many of the same lessons that apply in other forms of marketing and communication apply to e-mail. “Short and sweet” is the most frequently offered advice. Most people skim e-mail, often with their mouse pointer hovering over the “Delete” button, so you have very little time to get their attention before they click it and move on.

Use links to your website to keep the text in the e-mail short. If you’ve captured their attention, they’ll click and look more closely. If not, they don’t have to wade through copy to get to something that may interest them more.

Bowe signs up for retail e-newsletters for stores similar to his own, just to get ideas about content and format. When he sees one he likes, he makes notes. He also looks at which e-mail service, if any, handled it and researches that company.

“Make it useful” is the second important tenet, but there are many ways to do this. They range from offering online coupons or discounts to providing helpful information that relates to your products or services—a recipe, tips on jewelry cleaning or auto maintenance.

Semp advises using niches to segment your e-mail audience, especially if you carry a wide variety of items. Then your e-mail newsletter—say, to your “Knitter’s Club” or your “Quilt Block-of-the-Month Club” newsletter—can really target their interests.

Always include an easy way for your readers to remove their names from your mailing list. In addition to preventing negative reactions from those who don’t find it useful, you are reassuring those who do stay on your list that you’re honest and respectful of their attention.

How often?
“I love e-mail marketing because it’s free,” Bowe said. “But therein lies another problem—because it’s free it’s tempting to do it too often.”

Bowe has been cautious up to this point not to overuse e-mail marketing.
“I consider my e-mail database a valuable asset and I don’t want to burn it out by overusing it,” he explained.

His in-store customer list gets an e-mail about every four to six weeks, timed in conjunction with store events such as a new artist show. If there’s nothing useful or interesting to announce, he will hold off for another week, so customers don’t feel the message is useless.

His online customer list gets e-mails somewhat more frequently, announcing online promotions.

“The e-mail-a-week (or even more frequent) that some national retailers do is just not going to stand out the way a less frequent e-mail does,” Bowe explained. “It’s like the store that has sales pretty much constantly. There’s a burnout effect.”

At the Corner Store, which features gifts and crafts, Semp has found that an e-mail newsletter every three weeks is a good frequency.

“More important is to be consistent—make sure it’s going out on a regular basis,” she advises. It’s too easy to let the newsletter slide if you do not stick with a calendar.

Maintenance
Maintaining your e-mail address list will be time-consuming, especially as the list grows and as you use it more.

“There’s more work to doing it in-house than I would have guessed,” said Bowe. “You have to be scrupulous and prompt about removing a name when requested.”

For that reason, Bowe is considering going with an outside service that handles e-mail marketing for companies. Such companies offer a wide range of services, from simply managing the address list to helping create and format the message, providing detailed reports and tracking, and higher-level strategies.

The e-mailing services Bowe has looked into charge about $25-35 per month for a list of under 1,000 addresses, according to Bowe’s research.

“For e-mails that go out once or twice a month it’s not that expensive when you consider all elements, what you get and how much you’re spending doing it in-house.”

Semp agrees that it’s important to promptly remove people who wish to be removed. “You’ve got to be extremely respectful of their requests and their time,” she said. “After all, if someone doesn’t want to be on your e-mail list, whatever you send them is considered spam—not good for your business image.”

In Semp’s case, the website developer that handles her website also handles her bulk e-mails. Increasingly, the two services are being bundled. This is logical since the website is often the best means of obtaining names and the e-mail often refers customers to the website. However, both services can still be obtained separately, and you’re not obligated to use both just because both are offered by a third-party.

Beyond marketing
Roy Saper, of Saper Galleries in East Lansing, doesn’t “push” marketing messages to an e-mail list at all. “I don’t want even one client of ours to have a negative reaction to one of our communications, said Saper.”

Yet he uses e-mail constantly.

“About 30-40 percent of our transactions now involve e-mail communications at some point,” said Saper. “It usually begins as an inquiry about something on our website, which they typically found through a search on a specific topic or artist.”

This e-mail inquiry gets a very quick reply—within 24 hours, often within an hour or two. The reply is detailed and thoughtfully written, with all the information the person could want about the item, including photo attachments. The first e-mail exchange, however, will not include shipping information unless it was requested—Saper doesn’t want to seem presumptuous.

“Often customers tell us we were the first to reply to an inquiry, or that our reply was the most complete and helpful,” he added.

“E-mail is the lifeblood of our operation,” said Saper. “We wouldn’t be doing anywhere near the volume of business we do today without e-mail.”

Saper Gallery’s website—which is strictly informational, with no online transactions—was created in 1990. In June 2006 there were nearly 1.7 million hits (clicks on pages within his website, not individual people).

“That’s a lot of eyeballs that wouldn’t have known of us without the Internet,” he said. “As an integral part of our sales, it’s been the past four or five years that e-mail has had the most measurable impact.”

This article was written by Amy Buttery, Michigan Retailer staff writer.