Email Marketing – Best Practices Cheat Sheet
“Customers don’t sign up for email – they sign up for your brand.”
– Bob Frady
I chuckle when I hear tech pundits rave about the death of email. Far from dead: email is thriving.
In 2017, there was a 5% increase in emails sent in the US, and 72% of consumers prefer to hear from brands via email. Yes you heard that right: our customers want to see you on their inbox. Compare that with the multitude of places (interrupting their show, flashing over their favourite website) where they don’t want to see you.
Don’t Spam:
“Spamming” is fiendishly relative. While you may think of it as 10 emails/ day from Nigerian Princes/ long lost Uncles, I think of it as any email that exceeds the limits of how often I want to hear from you.
As a Garden Center, I wouldn’t recommend emailing more than once a week, unless you’re talking to different audiences/ segments about different things. It will be tempting to send an email about every new class, landed product and sale, but don’t. It will destroy your open rate erode your list via unsubscribes (you can’t get those people back, by the way).
Be Interesting:
To the customer, opening your email is where their leap of faith in you stops. After that it’s up to you to entertain them.
Avoid the dreaded “wall of text.” Post a teaser to your blog, and not the blog itself (you want them on your website, after all). If you’re promoting an event, tease them to a landing page with more details.
Make your text snappy and your pics simple, high quality, and beautiful. Remember that the majority will be opening on their phone, so the wide-screen panorama of your Nursery will look like noise. Opt for a simple dahlia in flower, instead.
If your email isn’t scrollable on a phone (ie. the reader comes upon a block of text that fills the screen), you’ll probably lose them.
Build a Quality List:
Content is king, but the list is the kingdom. Without the kingdom, the king is talking to the wind.
There are a multitude of shortcuts to building your list, and you’ll be frustrated with all of them. You can have a draw and ask for emails in order to win something (in which case they really don’t care about what you have to say), or you could buy a list (which just feels dirty).
Quality comes from patience. Produce quality content, be consistent, and the people who want to hear from you will sign on. If you spend some money to make things move a little faster, use your content to incentivize them to sign up and tell them exactly what they’re getting.
When to Send:
Try to send your email on the same day, and as close to the same time as possible, every week. The goal? For your readers to wonder where you are if you’re an hour late.
You’ll be promoting your weekend sales, and you’ll need some time after the last weekend to pull that information together (ie. we didn’t sell enough Tulip Bulbs last weekend so we need to BOGO them this weekend). You’ll also need 24 hours for them to see the email before the weekend starts. For this reason, I like Thursday.
A caveat. The more “hobby,” and less “business,” the email is, the better it performs on weekends. If you develop a segment that’s exclusively content, and moves away from your sales and in-store information, consider sending it out Saturday, instead.