HAVE A REASON TO MAIL YOUR CUSTOMERS

Here are some ideas that work well:

1) A big fat discount coupon. This can be just for specific products or a blanket store-wide discount. You can set a threshold price for store-wide sales so you don’t end up losing money on your lower profit items, i.e. 10% off orders over $50.

2) Buy one get one free. If you’re promoting a product with enough of a profit margin, buy-one-get-one sales are fantastic sellers. Even if you sell a product people wouldn’t necessarily need more than one of, you can offer buy one get one of equal or lesser value. If you can pull this off it’s a great sales tactic.

3) Buy one get one ½ off. Same basic principle as the buy one-get-one, you just keep more of the profit while still offering the customer a deal.

4) Buy one get a free widget. It works very well for anything that can be accessorized; it’s really one of my favorite promotions

WRITE A KILLER SUBJECT LINE

It’s all well and good to have a great offer for your subscribers, but they won’t know about it unless they open and read your e-mail, right? Subject lines aren’t just as important as content and design…they actually can be more important. Your customers probably subscribe to more than just your newsletter and they’re probably not waiting in anticipation for your next mailing. If your subject is bland, it doesn’t matter how well-written the content is or how amazing the images of your products look, because most of your customers will delete your e-mail without opening it. People are being sold to everywhere they go and it seems everyone is always having a sale so: “Big Sale at My Store” isn’t going to get you the open rate you want.

So what do you write? What will keep them from deleting your e-mail and in fact, coerce them to open and act upon it? How can people decide if they are interested based on what amounts to nothing? Over-communicating is just as bad. For instance “Three Day Buy One Get One Free Sale On Modern Art Tapestries Handmade and Imported from Belgium For Stunning Home Decor.” Too long and it looks like spam.

You want a bite-size hook, not some long boring exposition that will be truncated by your customers’ e-mail client anyway. So make your message clear and concise: adding a call to action doesn’t hurt either. Try “Three Day Buy One Get One Tapestry Sale”, or “Get a Rod with Your Tapestry Purchase”, or “All Tapestries 20% Off This Friday”. These all work.

Don’t use all caps, avoid extra punctuation, and don’t use more than one exclamation point if you must use any at all.

WHAT MAKES FOR GOOD DESIGN?

Now that you’ve gotten your customer to take a look at your content, you need to capture their eye with your design. There are a lot of different elements and considerations that go into design so I’m going to start with the most basic and technically the only necessary one – product pictures.

Your products need to be the focus. Whether you’re featuring just one or a whole menagerie, your images have to be crystal clear and sharp. In other words, your products need to pop.

You can use in-context images or just simple product pictures. One layout I’m fond of using is an in-context image at the top either to the right or left of my offer text, then three to six regular product images in columns underneath. I’ve also had success with nine regular images in three rows arranged by category. But the design that works best for me may not work as well for your products and/or customer base, so always be testing new layouts.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

Scheduling is another very important factor in e-mail marketing success. Just as sales ebb and flow with the days of the week, so does e-mail response. There are a lot of different ideas and theories marketers have about the best day to mail but I firmly believe it varies by industry and customer type .This is just something you will have to test.

You need to get a feel for your customer base and how they like to do things. Look at your stats and figure out the day of the week and rough time you get the most orders. By rough time I mean morning, afternoon, or night and schedule your mailing to hit inboxes just before. That’s how you should begin and test from there. You should also test frequency of mailings. Your customer base, again, will dictate this.

If you put as much thought and care into designing your newsletters and e-mails as you do your website you will increase the value of your list and reap the benefits of repeat sales. Keep testing and digging deeper into the wants and needs of your customer base and you will create another income stream from within your existing business, it’s a wonderful thing.

1. Have a reason to e-mail your customers.
2. Create and test different types of sales – Buy one, get one, Single product, Free accessory, etc.
3. Write an eye-catching subject line to describe your sale and subscribers want to click.
4. Test different email design layouts.
5. Figure out your sales cycle and schedule your emails to go out right before your highest sales period.

Extracted from StomperNet SEO Intelligence Report, July 15, 2011.