Related posts:

1. Wine Email Marketing: Paranoid ISPs
2. Wine Email Marketing: Personalize, Everything
3. Wine Email Marketing: Responsive Lists are Better

• Responsive Lists are Better
• Double Check with Double Opt-In
• Paranoid ISPs
• Personalize, Everything
• Content is King (again), some Suggested Topics

Have a customized Thank You / Subscription Confirmed page

Most companies just have something like “Thank you for subscribing”.

Instead, immediately “pounce” on this consumer interest and encourage sales with an offer – perhaps a time-limited coupon. Show a popular wine brand and/or a super exclusive one with an Add to Cart Button right beside it.

Always personalize your emails – both ways

People are much more likely to response to real people not computers

• your From field should be name@YourStore.com not do-not-reply@YourStore.com
• your email should start with Dear (or Hi, Hey, Howdy) first-name, easily done through email marketing software

Have a Text Plan B

Send out html emails by all means. However keep them simple and make sure you have text as well as images. The classic email mistake is a fancy image-only email as it will never be shown to people who block images in their email Inbox (e.g. gmail users). It’ll be a blank email – not the best way to get response…

Also html emails can come out poorly formatted with silly backgrounds that show no text.

My preference is to use text for B2B emails, and limit html in B2C (to just shots and your logo). You then refer people to a web page to see a perfectly formatted landing page on your website.

Regularly send out emails

An email is an attempt at maintaining and building a customer relationship. If you don’t regularly say or offer something interesting then that relationship will just wane away. If you’re good at writing (or podcasts or videos) then once a week is great, otherwise no less than once a month. The rule of thumb is to not expect any action until you’ve contacted someone 7 times.

Send a little bit of content a lot, rather than a long email a little

People hate long emails (and posts, I better finish this one soon ). You also want one message per email. So take each idea and send it out separately in a few paragraphs, if not just one.

This promo one week, that tasting the next, a new release on the third sort of thing.

Too frequent

I get Gary Vaynerchuk emails everyday and I don’t mind, because I find his content entertaining and informative. I’ll be honest – I only open up some of the videos though and just delete the rest.

Some lists send me emails I read just once and immediately unsubscribe – the content was just plain boring or irrelevant. So how often depends on your skill and the interest of the recipient. Like I said once a week seems about right.

What else would you add?

Related posts:

1. Wine Email Marketing: Paranoid ISPs
2. Wine Email Marketing: Content is King (again), some Suggested Topics
3. Wine Email Marketing: Responsive Lists are Better

• Responsive Lists are Better
• Double Check with Double Opt-In
• Paranoid ISPs
• Personalize, Everything
• Content is King (again), some Suggested Topics

How to handle email unsubscribes and paranoid ISPs

If you use a professional email marketing service (e.g. aweber or mailchimp), you can automatically process the regular unsubscribe requests you get from your email list.

These services put a simple unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email they send out. At anytime your subscriber can automatically unsubscribe by clicking on the link. They generally charge about US$30 per month for a list of 500 to 2000 or thereabouts.

Apart from being saved from the tedious job of manual unsubscribes you also keep internet service providers (ISP) happy (e.g. Yahoo or AOL). If these guys get a complaint and blacklist you then its a long drawn out process to get back in their good books and through their spam filters.

Similarly the email marketing service providers automatically “clean” your lists

If someone’s email expires the email marketing software removes them from your list. Emails expire due to inactive use, moving companies or ISPs. If you don’t remove these then the ISPs may well find out and, you guessed it, assume you’re spam (because you’re sending to inactive email accounts) and blacklist you. Brutal.

Using MS Outlook?

If you have a small list you may be able to get away with this. But once you send 200 (and perhaps even 50) people an email the ISP’s again start to get nervous and may tag your emails as spam. You also have the manual unsubscribe issue.

The Law

Most western countries now have anti-spam laws. In the US this is called CANSPAM. To abide by this legislation you need to provide your physical address and the ability for recipients to unsubscribe. Some people put in a telephone number as well. There are various other constraints most of which are common sense IMHO.

So you’ve got double opt-in, automatic unsubscribe, a ‘clean’ list, don’t use Outlook and abide by the law?

Gotta be fine now right?

Sorry, you can then find your recipients aren’t even opening your emails.

You’ll may never really know. The traditional way of an email service working out whether an email is opened is through analyzing whether a tiny image in the email is downloaded. However many recipients (e.g. Gmail users) have images turned off so this analysis can be very inaccurate.

They could also be going straight into the Outlook spam folder or deleted by the subscriber without opening them.

Use an email marketing service and you’ll get a majority of your emails opened

Depending on your content, which I’ll get to soon.

What bad stories do you have of ISPs and spam filters stopping legitimate business email?

Related posts:

1. Wine Email Marketing: Double Check with Double Opt-In
2. Wine Email Marketing: Responsive Lists are Better
3. Wine Email Marketing: Personalize, Everything

• Responsive Lists are Better
• Double Check with Double Opt-In
• Paranoid ISPs
• Personalize, Everything
• Content is King (again), some Suggested Topics

In the previous post we looked at how a small responsive list could be much more valuable than a large unresponsive list. In this email we’re going to focus on one important point in boosting the quality of your list,

the Double Opt-in Process

This is where a subscriber is sent an email asking them to click on a link to confirm that they have subscribed. When they do this the link notifies your email system that the person has opted in twice (“double”) and is therefore a valid email subscriber.

If you do nothing else, force your subscribers to double opt-in to your emails. Subscribers who do this,

• are found to be more responsive
• cannot say to the authorities they did not opt-in as you have proof that they did
• cannot be subscribed by someone else
• confirms that email address is correct

All the big email marketing service providers (e.g. aweber, mailchimp, iContact, Vertical Response) have this process.

I agree that it puts a barrier in front of a potential subscriber. But email has had such a checkered history of delivering spam that it is worth their inconvenience.

What opt-in process do you have?

Related posts:

1. Wine Email Marketing: Paranoid ISPs
2. Wine Email Marketing: Personalize, Everything
3. Wine Email Marketing: Responsive Lists are Better

If you’ve been following my posts you’ll know this process is:

1. Traffic – generate traffic to your site, especially from Google
2. Conversion – convert this traffic into sales through probably good content, user shopping experience,  suitable wine range and fair prices
3. eCommerce – have an eCommerce website i.e. online catalog, shopping cart and order administration system
4. Repeat Customers – turn new customers into repeat customers probably through great customer service and follow up marketing.

I’ve done a series of emails for small wine retailers looking at each part of the process – apart from Repeat Customers, which I’ll start today.

So essentially this starts a series of posts on wine email marketing:

• Responsive Lists are Better
• Double Check with Double Opt-In
• Paranoid ISPs
• Personalize, Everything
• Content is King (again), some Suggested Topics

Essentially this is wine email marketing. In a previous wine email marketing post I said the following:

###

My key tips for wine email marketing

• mix up sales messages with wine information
• not too often, not too late – every 1-3 weeks
• use an email marketing service (iContact, MailChimp, VerticalResponse, aweber etc; there are scores of them) to send out email as this allows double opt-in, auto unsubscribe, personalisation, segmentation, tracking and helps you comply with anti-spam law
• an email marketing service that automatically integrates (via a things called plug-ins, components, APIs) with your ecommerce website is preferable
• some suggest a plain text email rather than a pretty html email works better (this school of thought uses plain emails because of poor html presentation in customers’ email software and it also appears more personal)
• some suggest mid week is better than weekends, Monday or Friday.
• do A/B split testing to test different ideas e.g. send half the list with one subject line and half with another to see which works better, then this becomes your control and you try and beat it next time with a new subject (continuous improvement)
• have a email subscription form on every page of your website and ask customers to opt-in to receiving messages pre or post purchase.

The key point though is to turn expensive acquisition of new customers into profitable long term customers by building a relationship via email. You can also do this with blogs, facebook and twitter but email is still the proven method.

###

I’ll be going over these tips in the next few posts

But first let’s do some math. It’s real simple math:

List size * Delivery rate % * Open rate % * Click through rate % * Conversion rate % * Order value $ = Value of one email mail out

Notice how the list that is 10 times smaller has an order value four times bigger!

So it’s not size of your list it’s what you do with it (no joke intended).

You could go further: if you send out 24 great emails to a responsive list then that’s $27,000, vs 6 poor emails to an uninterested list of $1500 per annum

But the math gets even worse

It may cost $5 to get a customer using Adwords i.e. $1 per click * 500 clicks * 1% conversion = $10 (no more math in this post I promise!).

But the margin on the sale is only $5, so you’re no further ahead unless you get repeat sales (note if you do then you can afford to pay these advertising costs and start to dominate your local market).

So in this series of posts I’m not going to look at list size but how to make your list more responsive

Got any tips before I start?

Related posts:

1. Wine Email Marketing: Content is King (again), some Suggested Topics
2. Wine Email Marketing: Paranoid ISPs
3. Wine Email Marketing: Personalize, Everything