content ideas

The Yin and Yang of Yoga Marketing

August 19, 2010 By Amanda Gagnon

In ancient times, yoga was practiced by ascetics seeking higher consciousness.

Today, everyday folk perform asanas in your studio – if they can find the time. Amid the thousand responsibilities of work and home, yoga can be overlooked.

But sometime in their day, your customers probably check their email. Finding a message from you can help bring their practice back into focus.

The Yoga Garden is a studio that email markets with a combination of diversity and sameness. Apply this balance to your own email marketing campaigns to keep your customers engaged, responding and staying on the path to enlightenment with you.

What Your House Can Teach You About Email Marketing

June 22, 2010 By Rebecca Swayze

An effective email marketing campaign requires framework. Successful marketers will always be the first to tell you that their campaigns are the work of careful planning and diligent consideration.

It’s actually much like building a house. There’s no way you can construct a building haphazardly, without direction, and turn out a flawless finished product. The result would be chaotic!

The same goes for email. You can’t randomly send messages to your clients and prospects without establishing expectations and formulating a plan, or they will tune out and unsubscribe due to your lack of organization.

Follow these guidelines for constructing a well built house and you’ll be on your way to creating a profitable and manageable email campaign in no time.

11 Email Marketing Ideas for Wineries

June 10, 2010 By Amanda Gagnon

Idyllic days in the sunshine. Ruby liquid in sparkling glasses. Merry picnickers and live music.

It’s these moments – drinking your wines and visiting your vineyards – that your customers remember. But even the best memories can fade.

Email marketing can remind your customers what they’re missing. It can invite your visitors back. It can inspire your fans to go buy that favorite bottle again.

Once you build up a solid list of subscribers, you’ll need some creative ideas to spark your customers’ memories and bring them back for more.

Pairings and Recipes

If your chardonnay sparkles with scallops, let your customers know. Pair your wines with complementary dishes and share the recipes.

If your Burgundy is excellent in beef stew, share that, too. Original recipes for dishes cooked with your wines are even more valuable. If you have an online store, make sure to link up the wines.

Seasonal Gifts

People are always searching for unique gifts. Show them what you have to offer, whether it’s festively wrapped wines for the holidays, wine and chocolate sets for Valentine’s Day or picnic baskets for Mothers’ Day.

Fun Facts

Identify wine myths vs. facts. Quote some trivia your readers will want to quote themselves. Feature a rotating glossary of wine-making terms.

Your customers may not know why racking wine does not mean putting bottles into wine racks. Tell them why. Give them more than just discounts – give them an education. With insider information, they’ll feel good about themselves and grateful to you.

New Merchandise

Giddy tasters and frequent visitors alike bring home the winery experience with glass charms, drunken olives and other goodies. If you add a new must-have item, email your list – they’ll be sure to keep an eye out for it next time they visit.

Videos show off your winery even when your doors are closed. They also let you share more content than the typical email can hold.

Use video for educational demonstrations, “meet our team” introductions and sweeping panoramas of your estate that call visitors back. Post them to YouTube and link to them with a clickable screenshots in your emails.)

New Releases

Stir up some excitement! Introduce new vintages with fanfare. Tell your subscribers where they can find the new wine, and let them know that you can’t wait for their reaction!

As faithful readers of your content and proclaimed fans of your winery, your subscribers might deserve a little extra once in awhile. Reward subscribers (and keep them coming in) with email-exclusive discounts and offers.

Events

Live music performances, tastings, tours of your production area, grape stomping festivals, wine education classes with guest speakers – if you host these, get the word out!

Send an invitation to your subscribers early enough for them to plan ahead, but not so early that they forget!

Rate Your Wines

Your wines may win regional awards, but aside from recognizing this as a mark of quality, customers may not have much reaction. Instead of telling them someone else’s opinion, ask theirs.

Have visitors to your tasting room rate your wines. Periodically invite your readers to send ratings to your “from” address. Announce the winners in an email that subscribers will check to see – Did their favorite win?

Classes

If you offer wine education classes on-site, make sure to invite your local subscribers (try segmenting by location). Summarize the best points from the class afterward so the rest of your list can benefit as well.

Don’t forget pictures! Ambiance is an important part of the wine lifestyle, so extend yours to your newsletter.

Show the grapes being crushed, the wine being bottled. Feature your winemakers, bartenders and grape pickers – give your readers faces to recognize when they visit.

Don’t forget to watch out for minors! Make age a required field on your sign-up form. Marketing to those under-age could result in fines.

Your Award Winning Ideas

As a winery, what content do you send your subscribers? Do they respond? Do they mention your messages when they visit?

These ideas can easily translate to other businesses. Hotels and restaurants can use images for ambiance. Fitness bloggers can highlight fun facts. Galleries can announce new shows.

What kinds of content can you create from these ideas?

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Filed Under: autoresponders, content ideas, Email Marketing Tagged With: aweber, Beef Stew, Burgundy, Chardonnay, Chocolate Sets, Creative Ideas, Educational Demonstrations, Email Marketing, Frequent Visitors, Glass Charms, Insider Information, mailing list, Marketing Ideas, Mothers Day, newsletter, Olives, Panoramas, Picnic Baskets, Scallops, Unique Gifts, Valentine S Day, Wine Racks, Wineries

Email Tips for Brick & Mortar Stores

April 13, 2010 By Amanda Gagnon

For brick and mortar businesses, email marketing may seem too time-consuming. After all, you’re busy designing window displays, training associates and counting inventory.

But emails can prompt more purchases. They can remind local customers to swing by and inspire long-distance customers to visit on their next trip through. They can even offer extra incentive to shop with you.

And though you may not know it, your store already has content for the emails. Read on to find out what this content is, how to get it to your customers and how to make sure it’s well-received.

How To Go From Brick & Mortar To Click & Mortar

Collect Email Addresses

First, collect your customers’ (and potential customers’) email addresses. Emailing them without permission is spam, so make sure you’re cleared to occasionally pop into their inboxes. Ask for them:

At the point of sale. Hand each customer a card with their receipt that promises a discount on their next purchase in exchange for their email address.
During customer satisfaction surveys. Include a field for email addresses, and be clear that those provided will be mailed to.
With signup forms on your web site. It’s a good idea to include one on each heavily trafficked page.

Send Messages

Once your list is ready, start emailing. Send out broadcasts to:

Bring customers into your store by alerting them to sales and promotions.
Demonstrate creative ways to use staple products. Make sure to point out where the products can be found in your store.
Introduce new products. Explain how they can be used with current products. Specify where and when they’ll become available.
Deliver printable coupons. These keep your customers opening your emails and coming into your store to redeem them. They also encourage new subscriptions from word-of-mouth recommendations.

Make sure to list your hours of operation and phone number, and provide a way for subscribers to offer feedback.

Segment and Target

Rather than sending the same messages to your entire list, you may want to boost relevance with segmentation. This lets you send each customer the emails they want most. You can segment, or divide up your list, in endless ways. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Ask for preferences on your sign-up forms. Add fields to find out what content and format each subscriber prefers. Then create segments based on those preferences.
Send out an optional survey to collect preferences after the sign-up – keeping the sign-up form itself simple.
If your business is a chain, you may want to segment by store location according to IP address. If you have just one location, you can use the same tool to segment by distance.

Use this information to segment your list. Then send each email to the appropriate segments.

Conclusion:

If you are a brick and mortar business, do you have an email marketing campaign?

How much time do you spend on it? How do you divide your efforts between in-store happenings, other marketing and your email campaign?

If you don’t email market, what’s stopping you?

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Filed Under: autoresponders, content ideas, Email Marketing, list building, segmentation Tagged With: Amp, aweber, Brick And Mortar, Broadcasts, Current Products, Customer Satisfaction Surveys, Email Addresses, Long Distance Customers, mailing list, Mortar Businesses, Mortar Stores, newsletter, Phone Number, Point Of Sale, Printable Coupons, Promotions, Receipt, Segment, Signup Forms, Target, Time Consuming, Window Displays, Word Of Mouth

Email Spring Cleaning: 4 Easy Ways

March 25, 2010 By Rebecca Swayze

Just a few months ago, New Year’s resolutions were the highlight of many email marketing conversations.

With the best intentions, businesses set out to grow their lists by the thousands and send more targeted, relevant messages. They made lists and reviewed last year’s figures, invigorated by the new year and certain that they could increase click through rates and ROI by leaps and bounds.

Perhaps you even set lofty goals for your own campaign, only to be sidetracked by more pressing issues. If you’ve temporarily put your resolutions on the back burner, refocus your efforts with these spring cleaning techniques.

Dust Off Your Messages

You should treat old emails like attic treasures. Just like you stash your belongings away, only to rediscover them in a flurry of excitement later on, take a close look at your existing messages and examine the available reports for your account.

The Verified Subscribers report shows exactly how many people have confirmed their subscription in the past 30 days. If you aren’t satisfied with your current results, re-purpose your old confirmation email to make it sparkle.

The Follow Up Totals report displays the total number of clicks and opens for each message. If necessary, change up your content to make it more conversational and engaging and fine tune your follow up messages to reflect questions that you frequently receive from subscribers. Examine your subject lines and determine if they are compelling and consistent enough to click through.

Using templates? Make sure your messages look good in all email clients – test them.

Polish Your Web Forms

If you haven’t tried the new Web Form Generator yet, now is the time.

Make your forms shine without any HTML knowledge whatsoever. You can create visually appealing forms that give your website a more polished and professional look in only 5 minutes.

Because you don’t need to edit the HTML for your page each time you work on your form, you can make changes whenever you want without a hassle – you could even try seasonal templates if you’re feeling festive.

Campaign Overhaul: Renovating Emails and Forms

When you’re pouring over various reports and rewriting entire message sequences, how can you be sure that the changes you’re making are the best for your email marketing efforts? By split testing, of course.

Split testing lets you conduct a controlled experiment with your sign up forms and messages to help to see which factors make them perform better for your campaigns.

Web Forms

Split testing web forms lets you evaluate:

Which type of form works best for you (e.g.pop-over vs. inline)

How many fields you should use

Which field labels work best

Whether or not your headline copy is compelling enough

Email Messages

Split test your new messages against your old ones to learn…

Does sending in the morning work better than sending in the afternoon?

Does using a button instead of a text link get me more clicks?

Does subject line personalization get you more, or fewer, opens?

For accurate results, split test broadcasts can only be created for lists that have at least 100 active subscribers.

Revive Your List With Some Careful Pruning

Yard work goes hand in hand with spring cleaning, and it’s common landscaping knowledge that most plants benefit from regular maintenance. Take a cue from mother nature – with careful pruning, your list can flourish.

This is not to say that you should immediately unsubscribe anyone who hasn’t opened recent emails.

Consider the number of disengaged subscribers on your list. To start, search for subscribers that haven’t opened a message in 3-6 months. Are there a lot of them?

Resist the urge to channel your inner Edward Scissorhands; don’t delete them them – try to reengage them first!

Think about what you offer in your emails. If your product is seasonal, are those subscribers really inactive? Perhaps they are simply not opening your messages because they are familiar with your brand and assume that they will still receive emails when they are ready to purchase.

What are Your Housekeeping Plans?

Are you clearing out your unsubscribes anyway, despite our advice to think it over? Rewriting messages?

We’d love to hear what you’re doing next with your lists! Share your thoughts on the blog.

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Filed Under: content ideas, Email Marketing, email newsletters, split testing, web forms

Email Spring Cleaning: 4 Easy Ways

Dust Off Your Messages

Polish Your Web Forms

Campaign Overhaul: Renovating Emails and Forms

Web Forms

Email Messages

Revive Your List With Some Careful Pruning

What are Your Housekeeping Plans?

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