Email Works

February 6, 2009 | In Marketing/Promotion | 1 Comment

Today’s Y!Store blog is yet another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and marketer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers, located in sleepy Starkville, Mississippi. Rob is a retailer who blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of Yahoo! Store: Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies. Rob is somewhat nervous about his upcoming trip to rattlesnake country with his brother and friends to capture audio and video content for one of their Yahoo! Stores, Gun Dog Supply, because he’ll be the only one without a gun.

Howdy! A while back, I emailed my good buddy, Paul Boisvert, Senior Product Manager on the Yahoo! Store team, and I was bragging. Two days earlier I had launched one of the best email promotions of my entire career, and I was feeling my oats. Just thinking out loud, I reviewed all the things that worked and announced all my new email marketing takeaways.

Paul said "Give it up for the blog," so here it is…

Email works. In this episode, I’m going to open the books and share some real $$$ numbers from the email marketing behind several real Yahoo! Stores. To keep me out of trouble, I will not reveal who owns the stores, what they sell, or their domains, to protect their proprietary information so I can show you the nitty gritty.

Old Marketing Chestnut: Acquiring a new customer is seven times more expensive than selling something else to an existing customer.

The power of email marketing was never lost on my momma. She knew how effective it was to touch base with your customers every so often to remind them that you sell what they need to make their lives better. She was packing every box by hand and knew that the next order might be the difference between making payroll this week or not! Sending out that weekly email newsletter back in 1999 was a royal pain, but I knew better than to let the week slip by without shaking the tree.

I’m completely sold. I’ve been marketing via email for more than 10 years now, whether it’s newsletters on a weekly basis, auto-responders mailing prospects over the buying cycle, or highly segmented customer targeting. I tend to go with what works best with the least amount of effort with different approaches on different projects. Email works.

Here’s what I was bragging to Paul about: I had worked pretty late the night before. I woke up when the phone rang. My client had just finished inventory, discounted the products online, and sent me the information I needed to build the email. “Can it go out before noon?” That’s less than an hour!

I rolled out of bed, grabbed a Diet Coke and in less than 45 minutes I wrote the copy, tweaked the product descriptions and headlines, built the HTML page, published the store, updated my customer list, and hit the SEND button. Whew!

Anxiously, I watched the merchant order notifications come in all afternoon. We finished the day with more than 350 orders and close to 200 orders the next day. Holy moly! That one email generated more revenue than the entire first year our company was in business. Email works.

If you want to make money, your email marketing needs to be both relevant and compelling. Relevancy means your products, offer, and even your writing style are targeted to the right audience. Compelling means your offer is interesting enough to get folks to open up that email, click on through to your Yahoo! Store, and buy something.

Offer good while supplies last

I think the offer is the most important component of a successful email marketing campaign. I used to think that sending something — anything — on a regular basis was good enough, but my friend Craig Paddock has finally convinced me: It’s the offer!

Just because an email is relevant to a customer, doesn’t mean that it’s compelling. We need to make them an offer they can’t refuse! How can you do that? Offer them a deal! Like what?

• Use loss leaders to get folks’ attention! Sell stuff at or below cost to motivate shoppers to browse your store. You’ll sell products other than what you feature in the email. I just like to shake the tree to get more traffic to my Yahoo! Stores.
• Liquidate some overstocked inventory. Manufacturers love to sell stuff by the pallet. You can actually do your suppliers the favor of taking their entire obsolete inventory off their hands. It’s amazing what you can get if you just ask.
• Free shipping offers work wonders, too. With media mail, it’s easier to send books and videos cheaply though the mail. We use this as a customer acquisition tool.
• Coupons work, but they can be dangerous. Be careful! Don’t train your customers to wait for a coupon each week.

Once you figure out what your offer(s) are going to be, then you can write the rest of your email. The hard part’s done!

Let’s talk about me

I think relevancy is second most important factor of effective email marketing.

On my bigger stores I divide my customers into four or five separate buckets based upon what products folks buy. Then I pick products for each group and send 5 different emails. The more specific the bucket is, the more confident I am that the folks getting the emails will be interested in what I have to say.

I use the TopRight.com email segmenting tool developed by my friend, Ron Pereira. I import new customers from a Yahoo! Store data export. I filter my list and define my buckets in his segmenting tool, and finally I push my now-segmented email list to a top-shelf email service provider, where I build, send the email, and track the results.

Now we’re targeting the right folks, but we send them something really compelling to cut through all the clutter in their INBOX.

Write effective subject lines

The only goal of the subject line is to get folks to open your email. Here are some tips on how I write subjects:

• Make sure the subject line actually says what the email is about: The Offer!
• Use popular manufacturers’ names in your subject line
• Insert your customers’ first names in the subject
• What’s the deal? Show the percentage off in the subject

Also, maximize the sender/from field to get more customers to open your emails. Emails from a person look less like advertising than emails from YourCompanyHere.com. Personally, I use my name, followed by my 1-800-number and my domain.

Keep it real

Here are some ideas on making your body copy more effective:

• Increase the sense of urgency by telling folks how many emails you just sent out to get those competitive juices flowing. "I just sent out 49,365 notes to other folks just like you. We do NOT have enough inventory for everyone, so please hurry if you think this deal is for you."
• Increase conversions by throwing in free shipping or other deal makers.
• If you’re having a killer price, make folks buy in with a larger minimum order to receive better pricing. Increase your average order size when you give away margin so those killer deals won’t hurt so much.
• Authenticity is so important. Write your email message like you would write to a friend using a normal, conversational style. Leave the marketing lingo for the corporate folk.
• Sign your name on your emails. I hate getting impersonal emails from the
  “YourDomainHere.com Marketing Team.”

Email works. It’s so important that I believe you need to do it yourself for it to be done right. One of my favorite retailers just quit outsourcing his emails. He now actually hand crafts his weekly emails with a personal touch, relevant content, and tons of background information on the products he sells. I may never ever read YOUR newsletter, but I read his newsletter every time it hits my INBOX to see what he’s gonna say next.

Email by the numbers

The purpose of email marketing is to generate repeat sales. How will you ever know if the time and energy and expense is worth it unless you track your email campaigns? Fortunately for all of us Yahoo! Store owners, Yahoo! Web Analytics makes creating and tracking campaigns easy. You just add a bit of tracking code to the end of the URLs in your email, and Y!WA shows you how effective (or not) your emails are. Also, whatever service you use to send emails should have some tracking as well.

But what numbers do I look at?

• The goal of the subject line is to get folks to open and read your email. The metric I use to track that is Open Rate, or the percentage of opened emails compared to the total sent.
• The primary goal of the email itself is to get folks to click the link and go to your Yahoo! Store to the offer page. The metric I use to track that is Unique Clicks, or the percentage of unique visitors who click a link to the total number of emails sent.
• The primary goal of the offer page is to get folks to give you money. I track total revenue and revenue per email.

Top Right stats

• 49,362 sent
• 11,510 opened
• 23.3% open rate
• 4,583 uniques clicked (9% of total sent)
• $92.73 average order size
• $25,038.53 campaign
• 270 orders
• 51-cents revenue per email sent
• .005% conversion rate (of emails sent)

Yahoo! Web Analytics campaign

• 4,097 clicks
• 1,966 unique visitors
• 657 returns
• 13.18% bounce rate
• $18,562.35 campaign sales
• 200 orders
• 4.88% conversion rate (of visits to site)

By product / Yahoo! Store stats

590 orders with $44,380 in revenue for products in email, but these were also featured on the store so orders overlap…

Sometimes the numbers don’t add up. That’s why I track with multiple methods to make sure I can attribute all the credit to the marketing method that got the job done!

Your bucket list

Email works, but segmenting email works better! In one of our stores I doubled the effectiveness of my weekly promotional emails by segmenting my customer lists by interest. On other projects, sometimes I’m a bit lazy and send a generic email blast.

For example, in my Mom’s dog store, I can safely assume that most of her customers have a dog and would be interested in dog training collars. But exactly what kind of dogs do they have? And what activities do they like to do with their dogs? There’s a big difference between a guy like my baby brother (13 dogs and a Ford F-350 pick-up truck), a serious breeder / show dog competitor, and a guy like me with a mutt for a pet. When you send the same generic email to all three types of dog owners, fewer will open it, read it, click though, and buy.

Want another example? Say you sell licensed college sports apparel. Segmenting your customer list is a no-brainer. For example, filter all the customers who bought something containing "Mississippi State" or "MState" or "MSU & Bulldogs" in the product NAME field and you know you have a list of Mississippi State Bulldogs fans. Now, just send these folks emails about new Mississippi State Bulldogs merchandise — products they would be specifically interested in — and you’ll get more traffic and sales.

Don’t drill too deep, though. There’s definitely a point of diminishing returns. You just have to decide how much work you’re willing to put in on each bucket.

So how do you segment your customer list? It depends. Some Yahoo! Stores’ lists are easier to segment than others because product names often contain keywords that indicate the right customer bucket.

• Have 1,000 customers on your list? You might just send a weekly newsletter with specials and info on new products.
• Have 10,000 customer emails on your list? You could probably bucket your list into two or three distinct groups of customers.
• Have 100,000 names? Divide that list into 10-12 segments and still get a pretty good bang for the buck.

Today I covered how our company has used email marketing as an extremely cost-effective way to generate repeat business for our Yahoo! Stores and clients. Last summer, I did a webinar with Ron Pereira of Topright.com covering similar information. I uploaded the slides here (no audio though): Yahoo! Store Case Study: How I got an $826,221.62 sales increase.

Look — I don’t consider myself an email marketing expert by any means. I’m a merchant with a Yahoo! Store, just like you. Since 1997, I’ve found several things that have worked well for many different Yahoo! Stores to make more money online. The more info I share, the more folks share with me, so if you’ve got some good stuff drop me a line sometime.

Rob Snell
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

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