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Keep customers coming back with
e-mail
By Jennie
L. Phipps • Bankrate.com
Take Mike Culwell's word for it: e-mail marketing
is simple, cheap and -- best of all -- effective. If you're not
using it to promote your bricks-and-mortar business, you're missing
out on a sure thing.
Culwell is the third-generation owner of an
elite men's clothing store in Dallas. He used to spend at least
$80,000 a year on direct-mail marketing. Now he spends about $8,000
on e-mail marketing, nearly phasing out the snail-mail alternative.
By his reckoning, he spends 10 percent of the amount he did before
and gets 100 percent more result.
"With direct mail, I used to be able to afford
to mail four times a year. Now I can e-mail 26 times a year, and
customers respond to it. This is a relationship business and e-mail
builds relationships."
For instance, in September, Culwell advertised
his fall suit sale. He used newspaper ads to reach new customers
and his 20,000-address customer database to reach his old customers
-- "We're an affluent market and probably 90 percent have and use
e-mail."
The campaign was successful, but toward the
end business trailed off, so Culwell sent out a reminder with a
coupon for an additional 10 percent reduction. "It took me an hour
to rewrite the e-mail sales piece and send it out and it cost me
pocket change."
The result? $20,000 worth of additional business
in two days -- directly attributable to the e-mail. "People thanked
me for reminding them."
Here are some tips from Culwell and e2Communications,
the Dallas e-mail marketing company he relies on to distribute his
messages, that will help anybody who would like to emulate his success
and use e-mail better.
Sign up eager customers.
e-mail sent to people who don't want it is called spam. At best,
it's a violation of Internet etiquette and highly ineffective. Culwell
initially developed his database by paying his employees $1 for
each customer who they persuaded to give the company an e-mail address.
Use e-mail to get people
in the door.
Culwell is a bricks-and-mortar merchant, not an etailer, so he gives
people incentives to come to his stores. Anyone who signs up at
his Web site gets a coupon worth $25 off the first $100 they spend
at one of his two locations. If they tell him when their birthday
is, they get $50 to spend -- no other purchase necessary. Culwell
calculates that the average customer who takes advantage of that
$50 offer actually spends about $265. So the coupon turns out to
be nothing more than a 20 percent discount -- "We can do that and
still make money," Culwell says.
Be timely.
When Culwell gets a new shipment of something current and fashionable,
he takes a digital picture and sends out an e-mail notice that very
day. "We're an impulse business. People see it, like it and buy
it."
Be responsive.
Customers will have questions and somebody has to answer them. Culwell
devotes an hour a day to e-mail customer service, but as he says,
"Replies turn into sales."
Be important.
e-mail is cheap and sending out something every day is affordable,
but Culwell rightly fears he'll turn off customers if he fills up
their mailboxes with junk. "I want to be relevant -- not a nuisance.
Getting my name in front of my customers twice a month is enough."
Jennie L. Phipps is a freelance
writer based in Michigan
-- Posted: Nov. 30, 2000
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