Welcome to the seventh article in our series “The Sum of the Parts,” in which consultant Rob Galkoff discusses the elements critical to successful e-mail marketing.
Do you have a welcome campaign? If you answered yes to this question but all you have is a simple auto responder saying “Thanks for joining our list, we’ll be in touch real soon,” then the answer is really no.
One of my clients sends out an auto responder that comes from orders@myclient.co.uk and simply says in the body of the text “Thank you for subscribing to the Myclient News mailing list.” The subject line is “Myclient News Subscriptions.” If that’s not bad enough, it’s also in plain text. As you can imagine, we are in the process of making some changes there!
Think about your own experiences. You’ve just discovered the most amazing Website, and you are desperate to become a newsletter subscriber so that you can be among the first people to hear the latest news about the brand. You’re enthused, excited, and a new brand ambassador. And then what happens?
1) You get a tacky one-line e-mail thanking you for subscribing
or
2) You get taken on a wonderful brand journey that captures your imagination and gives you an excuse to buy something now.
I know where I’d prefer to be!
Many companies offer people an incentive to join their club or subscribe to their newsletter. It might be a discount, free product, trial or even a series of articles. One of my clients, men’s suit manufacturer Brook Taverner, offers a free set of articles, “The Seven Most Embarrassing Mistakes Men Make When Buying a Suit,” as its e-mail welcome series. You sign up to the program and then receive the e-mails over the course of about a month. The open rates do tail off as the campaign goes on; however, the open rate for the first e-mail, the one subscribers receive immediately, is huge. Why? Because the customer has just interacted with the brand and is keen to know more about it.
This is the time to try to get the very valuable first order out of subscribers. Open rates for the initial welcome e-mail should be well in excess of 65%, so use this opportunity to talk to your new followers. In this initial e-mail you need to do several things:
1) Thank them for subscribing.
2) Tell them what’s going to happen next.
3) Give them an incentive to buy. You decide if it’s a discount (might be over a certain spend limit), free postage, buy-one-get-one-free, or a free product/gift. Do not be afraid to make the offer bold in this e-mail. To avoid annoying customers who have already made their initial purchase at full price, make sure the thank-you incentive is removed if they are receiving the e-mail after making a purchase.
4) Give them an opportunity to update their subscription preferences.
Most major e-mail service providers will be able to track who opened your e-mail. You can then use this information to target the nonopeners with an additional message.
Personalization is key to anything you do. Make your message relevant, and the subscriber is likely to make his first purchase. So, for example, if you collected the subscriber data in-store, not only address the welcome e-mail to the customer, but also thank him for coming into the store (and name the branch is you have multiple stores). If he purchased something, mention what he bought. And why not have the e-mail come from the person who served that particular customer (this is easy to do if the sales assistant puts his user ID into the subscription form). How impactful would that be?
Customer recruitment is one of the most costly things you’ll do. So many companies could increase their return on investment if they took their communications to the next level and made customers feel special, thereby giving them an additional desire to be a part of the brand. I urge you to speak to your ESP on making your recruitment and welcome campaign the best - the extra investment will pay off a hundredfold in a short period of time.
Rob Galkoff (rob@thebusinessconsultants.co.uk) is CEO of the Business Consultants. He was previously marketing director at multititle UK mailer Findel.
