Friday, April 8, 2011

Marketing Tip #182: An Important E mail Secret

Want to increase customer engagement and boost your email ROI?

Consider a “friends and family” viral campaign.

Here’s some information that will increase your email response rate...dramatically!

One of the tried and true email campaigns of yesterday was the "friends and family" email offers.

These "friends-and-family email campaigns" contained very targeted promotions sent to preselected groups of employees, business partners and perhaps best customers.

These offers were highly coveted and were perceived as being “better” than those available to the general public.

The campaigns not only were strong revenue performers, but also became effective acquisition tools due to the perceived value of the included offers.

Today, the friends and family campaign is typically distributed to the entire customer file. This type of campaign capitalizes on a perception of exclusivity; the customer who receives perceives that he is getting a better and more valuable offer than other people.

The perception of friends-and-family offers being “special” continues; going so far as to outperform on all key measurements, vs. otherwise identical promotions without the friends-and-family messaging.

In a recent study, Experian CheetahMail’s Strategic Services team found that "the most common offers during the 2010 holiday season for friends-and-family emails were 20% and 30% off".

During this same time period, many businesses also sent non-friends-and-family promotions with the exact same offer values.

When these campaigns were compared, the results were clear:

"Friends-and-family emails had 30% higher open rates and 27% higher click through rates, and they generated double the transaction rates and triple the revenue per email than bulk e mailings with the same offer".

How soon can you start a friends and family campaign for your bowling center?

p.s. If you need help on this, give us a jingle @ 212 867 2577 or email us at fredkaplowitz@gmail.