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Local Email Marketing Thrives on Highly Targeted Lists

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Email marketing list

A local email marketing program is inexpensive to start and challenging to build. If done right, the rewards are substantial.

Email sounds almost antiquated in the world of mobile and social media. But it remains one of the most cost and labor effective ways of reaching and retaining customers.

The best practices in email marketing apply to the local level. What makes the local level unique is the smaller audience and the cost limitations for the marketing budget in a typical local business.

The potential for a small audience sounds discouraging. Bu it takes only one lead that buys a house to produce a substantial commission for the Realtor who handles the sale.

It takes only one lead that buys the new car to deliver another substantial commission for the auto dealer salesperson and a nice profit for the dealer itself.

Best Practices

The best practices in email marketing are fairly simple. Success comes with implementing them correctly, consistently and patiently.

Doing it correctly is harder than it sounds because so many businesses are misled by bad advice. A common example is the business owner who buys an old list of email addresses and assumes they will deliver results.

More often than not, a bad list will deliver bad results – usually in the form of bounces, unsubscribes and spamming complaints.

The word “consistently” is important because it seems to be hard for many businesses to do.

They get distracted, discouraged by the results or find other priorities require more of their time. That’s why working on it patiently is so important in the long run.

Best practices fall under six main principles:

  1. Identify the audience target.
  2. Develop the email list.
  3. Brainstorm the incentive.
  4. Create the email.
  5. Manage the delivery.
  6. Track the results.
audience

Source: Wikimedia

1. Identify the Audience

Audiences often are segmented topically, geographically or demographically, even at the local level. It is an absolute necessity of modern marketing.

Think of the sections of a local newspaper because they are based on decades of trial and error by the newspapers to understand what their readers want. They are uniquely topical.

Sections often include news, sports, weather, entertainment, travel, recreation, obituaries, weddings, engagements, cars, jobs, homes, merchandise, yard sales and more.

A sporting goods store might do something as simple as develop and sponsor a little league newsletter that goes out once a week with scores and standings. A Realtor could produce a monthly newsletter of home sales within a community, zip code or even a neighborhood.

Geographic and demographic targeting

That idea leads to targeting geographically, which matters greatly to a store with a limited reach in a specific area. People rarely drive 50 miles to a restaurant if one that is just as good is only a few miles away.

So a local restaurant might decide it wants to focus its promotional effort on a few zip codes or even just one.

What if the restaurant is high end with a dress code and the kind of prices that appeal only to upper income diners?

Now the focus becomes demographic – a way of targeting that is based on income, age, gender or other characteristics.

A men’s clothing store of course cares about appealing to men. A babies clothing store is more likely to appeal to women.

2. Develop the List

Rule #1: Don’t buy a list if you are new to email marketing. Buying a list sounds like a quick and simple way to get started. Instead, it’s a quick and simple way to discredit the business. Many lists are often developed with questionable means.

Permission-based marketing is an important concept that says, in effect, “I am giving you my email to use for the purpose you describe and only that purpose”.

Sending an email newsletter to someone who didn’t specifically subscribe to it is called spamming and in extreme cases will subject the business to fines and even jail for the perpetrator.

In less extreme cases, people can file abuse complaints with the vendor who provides the email service. They even can file with Internet backbones such as Verizon that can lead them to ban the business.

Acquisition tactics

Email marketing tipsWhat are the best ways to acquire local email subscribers? There are only a small number of tactics, and they require a great deal of time and patience.

Build a signup form on the company website.

Post links to that form on the company’s social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

If there is an opportunity for someone to fill out a form in the store, include a box for the customer’s email address.

It is worth mentioning that building a high-quality list takes a long time. It also is worth mentioning that the typical list for a small local business won’t have thousands of email addresses.

Instead, they may have hundreds or maybe only dozens. But they are usually among the most loyal, lucrative and important customers of the business.

3. Brainstorm the Creative

A great effort at developing a local email list won’t produce results without giving those potential subscribers a great reason to sign up in the first place.

In the examples higher in this article, someone may sign up for a list of neighborhood home sales. Maybe they want to track the value of their house or they are thinking about selling soon.

Several hundred or even a few thousand parents may sign up for the little league newsletter not because of the sponsoring business but because they just want to track league results.

That’s the enticement, but the sponsoring business maintains a high profile in the newsletter because its name and maybe its logo are present in every email.

Coupons have always been a big enticement in local email marketing. They work especially well when a large group of businesses provide multiple coupons.

4. Create the Email

Subject Line

The subject line has the most important words in the entire email.

Write a great subject line, and more people will open it. Write a boring subject line, and fewer people will open it. It has a major impact on what is known as the “open rate” or percentage of people who receive an email that actually open it (usually 20 to 30 percent of the total).

Think of the subject line as being like a headline in a newspaper or magazine. Spend as much time as necessary making it both accurate and an attention getter.

Body

The best email marketer I ever met had a fantastic success rate with signing up subscribers. She was good at it because of her personality – creative, a great sense of humor and an entertaining style of writing.

She made the subject line and the content of every email a personal expression of herself. Then she wrote as if she was writing directly to an old friend rather than to 6,000 people she didn’t know.

The lesson here is to make the email creative, informative, entertaining, funny, personal, quirky or whatever suits the business and the personality of the person writing it.

Links

One of the most important goals for sending email newsletters is getting people to click on the links in the email to go to a website, read content, make purchases, etc.

The important metric here is called the “click rate” or percent of people who click within an email to undertake some desirable action. A decent click rate is usually in the range of 5 to 10 percent of all sent emails, although it varies for each email and the topics.

One way to increase the click rate is to make sure the most important and interesting links are located near the top of the email because people often don’t scroll far.

Photos and Graphics

Many email newsletters don’t have just text. They also have photos or graphics. But they are a mixed blessing.

Some estimates put the number of photos and graphics blocked by email services or email settings as high as 50 percent of the total. It’s an important number of know and should at least limit the need to add more than just a few photos and graphics.

In my experience, photos and graphics have only a minor impact on the click rate within an email. The quality of the image is one of the more important considerations. Make sure to place it nearest the links to draw attention to them and increase the click rate.

5. Manage the Delivery

Managing the delivery of an email newsletter usually means making decisions on the frequency and time of day.

The frequency can be daily, weekly or monthly. The choice comes down to the kind of content being delivered and how often the audience wants it.

A weather or news email often goes out once a day. A coupon email may go out once a week or once a month. The typical local retail business email is more likely to go out monthly.

It is safest to choose a conservative schedule and gradually increase the frequency rather than the other way around. if the frequency increases and so do the subscriber cancellations, it indicates the email is being sent too often or the content is not valuable enough to follow.

The best days to send an email during the week are usually Tuesdays through Thursday. People are less productive at work, work shorter hours or are more likely to take a day off on Mondays and Fridays.

The time of day is an easier choice to make. The best delivery time is usually mid-morning to mid afternoon.

6. Track the Results

Part of what makes email effective is the ability to track results.

As mentioned above, target an open rate of 20 to 30 percent and a click rate of 5 to 10 percent.

Track the churn or retention rate to make sure that more people are subscribing than unsubscribing. It is inevitable to lose subscribers, but look to add two or three for every one that goes away.

Finally, other ways of tracking the results are by looking coupon redemption, store traffic or other indications that subscribers are opening and using the emails. Keep in mind that a typical direct response rate is around 2 percent.

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