Cultivating Value with a Personal Message

Posted on | August 1, 2007  
Writen by | Ian Griffith

Story by Ian Griffith on 8/1/2007
In promoting your store to customers there has rarely been an opportunity like email; you can reach almost all your customers using a single communication tool. According to a recent Forrester Research report, 97% of consumers use email; “consumers and businesses are raising their hands and asking for email,” says Stephanie Miller in “Email Marketing Comes of Age.”

Sadly, this opportunity is being largely squandered. The prevailing wisdom has been that an email blast should be sent as far and wide as possible, in the hopes of churning up interest from the farthest corners of the Internet. Email campaigns have been treated like direct mail without the associated costs. Stores would send emails to every customer, irrespective of whether the customer was likely to be interested in the message. “Many marketers think of email as a broadcast channel, not as a way to connect with individuals,” adds Miller.

The Problem with Spam
The result has been Inboxes that are overflowing with unwanted messages. The outcry against Spam led the Internet Service Providers ISP to introduce Spam filtering techniques that block large mailing lists and suspicious keywords. Most customers can anonymously report any email as Spam, which results in e-mail traffic from that domain being blacklisted for a time. Many customers receive email from multiple addresses of differing priority, making it much harder to ensure your message is read.
Once you succeed in delivering your message it is important that customers perceive the message as being relevant to them. Your message will either be read or deleted and the next message will be evaluated based on how well your last message was received. If a customer sees your messages as irrelevant “permission spam” and stops opening them, it becomes very difficult to win that customer back.

By treating your customer emails as a precious resource, you are able to generate long term value from these customers. Aggressive broadcast practices reflect a short-term orientation on maximizing the sales from each email campaign that hurts the loyalty and lifetime customer value.

The key to future success with your emails is to build a strategy around messages that your customers value.

• You don't need to customize all your emails at once; if customers see at least one regular email as relevant and customized it raises the value of all your messages.
• Whenever possible, target your emails to customers that will be active recipients.
• By giving your customers control of the types and frequency of the messages they receive, you can be more confident that your emails are being read.M
• For maximum impact, create targeted promotions by building custom mailing lists from an analysis of your store's sales history.
• To improve the effectiveness of your messages, test your subject lines and offers on random samples of the same list.

A smaller mailing list of active customers builds more long-term value for your store than a long list of ambivalent recipients. Building longer-term relationships with your email customers will pay off as you become able to predict how likely customers will open your messages, and convert that interest into business.

To learn more about how the Beverage Media can help you Sell Wine Online with a website for your store, contact Ian Griffith at 212 571-3232 x318….

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