Ther's gold in them thar hills... or more likely, in the good
graces of your prospects and customers.
We are out of the dog days of summer and the holiday season is
quickly approaching. Now is the time to make sure that you are
maximizing the impact of your sales/marketing process,
specifically your communications with your opt-in email base of
prospects and customers.
Your opt-in email can be a lot of things including your
newsletter, order acknowledgements, customer service follow-ups
and so on.
If we approach our customer's right, using one of our most power
tools our opt-in email communications, we can significantly
improve our sales.
The October 2002 Consumer Email Study by DoubleClick revealed
some customer preferences that can help you improve your
results.
First, getting your prospect/customer to open the email can be
no small task. No matter what you say in your email, if they
never open it, it's a lost cause.
In the study, 60% of the respondents said that the most
important factor in opening their email was who the email was
from, while 35% said the subject line was most important. So
treat your opt-in base like gold and you have addressed 60%.
Remember, every message that you send to your list will be
evaluated by your customers and THEY will make the decision if
your email will be worthy of a look in the future. If you have
blown their trust in the past they may never open what you send
them or may permanently route you to the trash folder.
Still the subject line is most important to a significant
portion of email users. Some interesting gender based results
came out of the study.
Compelling Information/News 69% Male 46% Female
Discount offer 50% Male 64% Female
New Product Announcement 37% Male 39% Female
Free Shipping 28% Male 43% Female
If you are selling primarily to one gender you can make a
significant difference in open rates by using a subject line
theme which will get a larger response from that group such as
discounts for female and compelling news for males. Perhaps you
combine a discount with compelling news in the subject line.
When you think about it, getting a 64-69% open rate is pretty
significant considering the busy world in which we live.
Once someone has opened your email, the most important
motivational factor for an immediate online purchase (cited by
70%) is the discount, followed by merchant recognition (60%). It
is also interesting to note that 78% of the permission-based
email subscribers have purchased through an e-mail link. As you
can see these are some significant numbers!
What can do to improve our results?
Long-term, Continually Build Trust.
1) Strive to provide information and offers that are useful to
your subscribers, So that they WANT to open messages from you.
2) Do not abuse your list, too many messages sent to your e-
mail base no matter how useful will overload those subscribers.
3) Try to step into the shoes of you Audience and think how
they will react to your message.
Short-term, review and analyze your e-mail communications
tactics.
1) Review and test the subject line of your emails (offers,
newsletters, acknowledgements, etc.) to make sure that it is
appropriate, compelling and targeted for your Audience.
2) Look for appropriate cross-sell, up-sell opportunities
within e-mail communications that would be appropriate. Suggest
a complementary product with a discount in your order
acknowledgement e-mail. When done with tack, can be very
compelling and gives your customer a special deal.
3) Provide a free "something" as a thank you. It should be
complementary to your customer base so that they find it of
value. Periodic useful freebies can do wonders for your open
rate.
There where a number of other interesting facts in the survey.
You can get the whole survey at:
http://www.doubleclick.com/us/knowledge/documents/research/d
c_consumer_email_0210.pdf
Start today mining gold and building the trust of your best and
most significant source of sales, your permission based email
communications.
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Jeffrey Jordan, President of Net Marketing Results. He has 20
years experience enhancing profits of Fortune 500 mid and small
businesses. Subscribe free to Net Marketing Results Newsletter
at
http://netmarketingresults.com/signup2.htm Contact Jeff at
mailto:jdj@netmarketingresults.com
http://www.netmarketingresults.com
http://www.instantprofitpower.com
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