How many addresses do you need? A hundred, a thousand, one hundred thousand… Even a million addresses are not enough on their own. To organize a good marketing campaign you need to know much more about these addresses. What do you think of the following email address – sexy1000@hotmail.com? The right answer is nothing. It is just an email and that is it. What you need to know is the sex, age, name, surname, workplace, interests, as well as information connected with your line of work. If you are selling car parts, it is good to know whether the consumer has a car, what brand it is, how old it is, its color and model, and everything else you can think of.
It is highly important to have this information when sending your emails with concrete proposals to the consumers. I am driving a 2014 Mazda 2. It would be an absolute squandering of resource if everyone subscribed to the newsletter of a website receives an email with promotional prices for the filters of German cars, or of another concrete brand. In this case, most of the people will delete the mail because it is irrelevant and will be left with the feeling that they have made a mistake by subscribing to these newsletters. Many consumers will cancel their subscription.
If I receive a concrete offer for my Mazda 2, while the owners of Freelander receive only offers for Freelander – this is the key to success. Even if I do not want to buy a certain product, I would like to see what the offer is because it concerns my own car and the chances of deciding to make a purchase are seriously increasing. This practice is most often seen in the work of Amazon.com and eBay.com.
Every week I receive an email with offers addressed to me. The offers are arranged in the following way – products I have purchased recently but with newer versions or models and of the same brands. Then they offer to me results for products that I have searched for or looked at in the past. Even when they offer me car tires, the offers I receive are not simply for car tires in general but for the parameters of my own car. How can you refuse an offer that is personalized so much? The workers at the car repair shop I use do not know the parameters of my tires until I tell them, while eBay.com does and not only that it does know them but it also offers me the best prices at a time when it is supposed that I should change them for the new season.
This is a very complex mechanism but it is also the biggest online shopping website in the world. What you can do is to use a minimum amount of information for a maximum distinction of the type of people commanding your services. The sex classification can do a perfect job and it is easy as pie both in terms of collecting the data and of sending the newsletters later. Even if you have only the sex information, you can realize much more successful campaigns. Every week tens of group buying websites are sending me car parts offers, while my husband’s email is crammed with makeup promotions. Even women, who are ready to buy almost everything because it is offered at half its price, no matter whether they need it or whether they know what it is used for, will consider carefully, if these concrete “things” are worth the investment, although they are much cheaper.
Every service can be personalized in a package designed especially for the concrete consumer that will eventually win their approval. It does not matter whether you sell tourist packages, banking services, sports headlines, car parts, or legal services.
The more information you have about your consumers, the more personalized the newsfeed you send them will be. The more personalized it is, the more special the consumers will feel and the bigger the chance of buying what you are offering them is.
Sending connected letters is a good practice. For instance, you purchase a cell phone from a concrete website. Instead of offering other cell phones the stores often send offers for chargers, cases, different accessories and extras that can fit your very own cell phone model. This way the stores take advantage of consumer’s emotions from the purchase they have made and the high consumer trust that exists on their website. They do not let the consumers forget about the website they bought their cell phone from and instead go and buy a case from the local store. They take advantage of the euphoria about the new asset and the trust placed in the website to sell another product along with the first one.
Although it may sound complicated, these things happen automatically. If you work with about a dozen of clients, you can write to them or call them personally. However, if you work with 1,000 or 10,000 clients, things get out of control. Indeed, you have their data but it is physically impossible to analyze it. Not to mention that the bigger websites have much bigger databases. Some of the group buying websites work with half a million email addresses. Since we are already in the 21st century, automation is of crucial importance. It does not matter whether you will get software developed especially for you or hire one. What is important is for everything to go so smooth that eventually even you, as a consumer of your own website, to be pleasantly surprised to receive such perfectly personalized newsletters it sends.
How to collect high-quality data
There is a weird fact that most men register themselves as a female during their pointless registrations in different websites. This is not connected with their sexual orientation but rather with their unwillingness to provide any kind of information about themselves. When there are more fill-in fields and more data, you should be sure that most of the information is either fake or absolutely senseless.
There is a proven cure for this unpleasant fact and it is called a reward. When the consumers are offered material stimuli, suddenly they become ready to share even more information than the required one. If you announce a raffle for an expensive prize, which will be drawn in the end of the month among all registered consumers, you will generate a satisfying number of registrations with all the fields correctly filled in. What will make people fill in their forms with correct information instead of providing fake data? There are no guarantees but when the terms and conditions of the game explicitly state that the registration will be annulled in case of incorrect data and that the prize will be handed only after the winner presents an ID document, people’s motivation to fill in their real data is much bigger than to lie.
In the end, they join a game for something they are interested in and sincerely want. The example with the cell phone is not a random one. In my practice, we have organized such advertising games with all kind of prizes. The most efficient choice is to offer high-tech gifts, or personal gifts, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, netbooks, etc. It is a curious fact that the latest model of a smartphone or a popular laptop brand turns to be much more tempting for consumers than even a car. Collecting such information is not for free but only at the price of above $1000 you can get access to tens or hundreds of thousands of email addresses of people, who are potential clients and you can then tease them with your advertising offers. It is a matter of calculations when the investment will be returned is.
Email sending frequency
Even the very well personalized newsletters reach a point of saturation. Many group buying websites send letters every day. This stresses consumers out. They open their email and see 18 unread messages. They have to sift out the advertisements from the others. When they have to do this every day, the chances for a consumer to unsubscribe from your bulletin voluntarily get much higher. Even if they do not unsubscribe, the letters may simply be automatically sent from the inbox to the trash without being opened.
The optimal choice for communication with your consumers is once a week. To avoid negative emotions, choose a concrete day when they will receive your newsletter. For instance, they should know that they will receive what they expect from you on Mondays. It is not a good practice to send the letters on random days of the week or at irregular intervals. This feeling of insecurity may lead to cases when there is too much time between two emails and people may forget why they have registered on your website. This rule is often breached in the case of advertising games and the letter is sent half a year or a whole year after the game was organized. This leads to arguments with the Consumer Protection Commission because people no longer remember about their registration on this website because they have not received anything in the meantime.
Efficiency and design
Just when you think that you no longer need designers’ service and here there are again. The design of the newsletter is not of crucial importance. It is a fact that the graphic elements in the communication with your consumers give it a better look but they are not decisive for its efficiency. Just on the contrary, if the designer is not acquainted with the working principle of the different email services, they may create a design that is beautiful and pleasing to the eye but once sent as an email it may appear in an absolutely different way. The reason is that the different email services have different restriction and it is better to know the strictest ones – this way the newsletter will appear adequately and in one and the same way for most of the consumers.
