RETAIL STRATEGIES

Live from Las Vegas Market: How to have a successful e-mail campaign

On the eve of the Las Vegas Market, home furnishings retailers joined together to try to figure out how to tackle the problem of marketing in a new digital age. Organized by the Retail Marketing Alliance and The Lively Merchant, the Industry-Wide Web Summit was held in the Las Vegas Room at Harrah’s Las Vegas Hotel and Casino and featured seminars from various experts on everything from social networks to sending messages to people’s cell phones.

One of speakers was David McMahon of Profit Consulting, who offered 10 Tips to Step into the Modern World of Customer Relations. McMahon said the first step to developing a good e-mail relationship with your customers is to make sure that you are keeping track of your customers through a Customer Relations Management system, which can be as simple as an Excel file. Next, make sure you have online publishing software that interacts with your customer database. “How those two interact determines how well you can do e-mail marketing,” McMahon says.

Here are McMahon’s 10 tips for successful e-mail marketing:

1. Deliver Value: Everyone wants to deliver e-mail blasts, but if your e-mails aren’t relevant to the specific customer who receives it, it’s borderline spam. “You need to send messages that seem as if they’ve been written specifically for the person who receives it,” McMahon says.

2. Get e-mail addresses: Keep it simple and easy, but very prominently on your site should be a place to sign up for a VIP list. Use contests and special offers.

3. Segment your database: Who bought a bedroom set but not a mattress? There’s a good marketing segment. It’s all about following up with specific e-mail campaigns based on purchasing patterns.

4. Show style and substance: It’s not about pasting names into Microsoft Outlook. Think of the e-mail as the stationary you’re going to use. Use images, but understand that they also have to work as just text — a lot of people open their e-mails on Blackberries, so if you’re relying on a .jpg, a lot of viewers are never going to see it.

5. Speak to your customers, not yourself: Make sure your e-mails speak to the recipient’s interests, not your own (at least not obviously). They’ll opt out quickly, and McMahon notes that you only have, by law, 10 days to honor someone’s opt-out, and then you’re considered spam.

6. Write engaging subject lines: You really need to consider the “subject” and “from” lines when drafting e-mails. If they are not well thought-out, no one will open the e-mails in the first place. Here are some examples of good e-mail subject lines:
– Order confirmation: #35274864637
– Special event for San Diego Customers
– Preferred Customer Card for David
– Happy Birthday on Dec. 10!

An audience member at the seminar — Devin Kinsella, CEO of Etailer Solutions — said he knew of one retailer who sent out an e-mail to customers inviting them to an after-hours wine and cheese party to see new products.

7. Teach your customers something: Content should be a learning experience for readers. If your e-mail isn’t of value to them, they won’t open them (and will eventually opt-out).

8. Tailor your message: Transactional e-mails (emails that reference a specific interaction between the recipient and the store) have high open rates.

9. Track results: What are the open ratesfor your e-mails? Which e-mails bounced (i.e., didn’t deliver)? Were any e-mails forwarded to a friend? Did customers opt-out? Opt-out rates are just as important as click-through rates, and if they’re much over 1 percent, the quality of your list might not be very good.

10. Start now: Waiting a couple of years to start e-mailing your customers is not an option. You need to get this up and running before your competitor does.