Starting Email Marketing Campaigns

[Jennifer]

Piper,

Keep in mind that email services calculate open rates based on downloads of a hidden image in the html email. That means that an “open” gets recorded only if the reader opens the html version of your email with images turned on. If a reader views your email without downloading images – or if they receive a text-only version of your email – there will be no record of an “open.”

Open Rate is a key metric for comparing one email campaign to the next, but it’s not a totally accurate reflection of how many customers received and read your email.

 

[Napoli_Pizza]

Its tricky to do a 1 day promotion with email, because people have their habits about when they open it. So many probably catch up on their email when they come home from work, or early before they go in. Try scheduling it to send like 3am the night before.

Maybe another way to try a 1 night promotion might be SMS, or text marketing. Text message open rates are about 95%. New websites like www.textmark.com offer the service for free. If you could get customers to subscribe over the next few weeks, meaning they WANT your special by text, you might have more success.

I’ve made a few notes on a website I’m working on, on the side: http://www.napolipizza.net/IPM/TOUCHDOWN.html

 

[Piper]

Napoli Pizza:

Try scheduling it to send like 3am the night before.

That’s actually what I’ve always done. When I said “morning”, I had them send at 5:00am. I think the people checking their e-mail in the evening are people I’ve been missing out on. I had an additional 100 people open the e-mail AFTER the special was over!

I still want to stick with 1-day only specials though, I think I just have to work on timing. I have a lot of past history that has shown I get about twice the response rate sending three 1-day promos in a week than promos that were valid for an entire week. It’s a call to action.

On Thursday I got 22 back for almost $500 in sales, so I’m not complaining. But Hannah mentioned an open rate of 30%+, meaning there’s lots of room for improvement.
Napoli Pizza:

Maybe another way to try a 1 night promotion might be SMS, or text marketing. Text message open rates are about 95%. New websites like www.textmark.com offer the service for free. If you could get customers to subscribe over the next few weeks, meaning they WANT your special by text, you might have more success.

I already have a very extensive SMS marketing program. The open rates are higher like you said, but it’s tough to achieve the pure scale of e-mail. It is significantly more difficult to get people to sign up for text messages than for e-mails.