Welcome to chapter 4 of the RPS Software guide to profitable conservatory marketing.

Introduction – Marketing is a PROCESS

Often, people think of marketing as an event, such as placing an advert or exhibiting at a show. However, marketing is about relationships with other people. This lasts longer than a simple advert or single event and is all about regular communications.

The more often you communicate, the more your customer is likely to trust you and the more likely they are to buy from you when they are ready. There is much more about this throughout the chapters of the book, and in the individual sections which we are releasing now for people to download.

In this fourth chapter we concentrate on Email Marketing.

Almost every household and certainly every office now has e-mail. So collecting e-mail addresses from your prospects and customers is a great way to stay connected with them.

Regular contact through e-mail is one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing there is. The key is to make sure that your e-mails are interesting. They shouldn’t always be about products or sales, although I feel every e-mail should have some call to action at the end of it.

Don’t feel that your e-mails need to be formal and corporate. One of the worst experiences I’ve had is being sent corporate newsletters which are beautifully formatted to read like printed publications. They go straight into the bin.

Don’t be afraid of making your e-mails personal – people buy from other people, and letting your personality shine through will make your e-mails seem more human and more readable. Indeed, if you’ve read my e-mails you’ll know that I have a weakness for terrible puns, and inane facts.

Write your e-mails as if you were writing to a friend. Personalise them if you can, as most good e-mail software will let you do. In the example below, {firstname} will be replaced for each recipient with their real name:

Subject: RoofWright: Banana-man and the First Conservatory

Mike,

You may not be aware that the man who invented the conservatory also created the banana industry.

And you may never have even heard of the guy.

His name was Joseph Paxton, and he created the great glasshouse at Chatsworth House, which was arguably the world’s first “proper” conservatory in the 1830’s.

He was a true innovator, he copied the structure of his glasshouse from that of a water-lily (having seen the strength when he saw a floating leaf support his daughter), and even designed the wooden frame to act as a “railway” to run glass up the roof.

Paxton later went on to design Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 (for which he was knighted – not bad for someone who started life in poverty)!

His boss was the 6th Duke of Devonshire (one William Spencer Cavendish). One of his boss’s hobbies was collecting unusual plants, and in the 1830’s he came across the banana. Paxton worked out how to grow it at Chatsworth, and named it the “Cavendish” banana.

Shortly afterwards offshoots of the plant were shipped abroad and formed the basis of banana plantations around the world.

So pretty much every banana you’ll find in any shop nowadays can be traced back to that plant in Derbyshire.

So what’s the point of this story?

Well, firstly, it’s an interesting story to tell your customers.

And secondly, if you’re a RoofWright or UDesign customer, I’ll soon be explaining how stories like this can help you generate leads. All as part of the service.

If you’re not, maybe it’s time to see what else you get when you try RoofWright or UDesign RISK free for 30 days.

Simply visit www.roofwright.com to find out how. Or reply to this e-mail.

Hope This Helps!

Dave

Dave Blakeman

Managing Director

RPS RoofWright

PS. There is a sad part to this story. The Cavendish banana is under attack from a fungal infection. Unfortunately there is no cure, and because all Cavendish bananas are essentially “identical twins” there is no chance of them developing any immunity. So enjoy your bananas whilst they last – hopefully we will have found a replacement before the last plant becomes extinct.

End.

There are a few important things to note about this e-mail. Firstly it’s written as if I was writing to an individual, not a group of people.

Secondly, it’s got nothing to do with what we sell, although it finished with an invitation to take another look at our product. Hopefully, it’s also quite interesting, at least to my target audience.

Thirdly, it’s a simple plain text e-mail, with black text on a white background. No clever formatting or pictures as these are hard to read in many browsers, particularly smartphones, and in testing almost always perform worse than simple e-mails.

AIDA

Remember the AIDA Formula we shared in Chapter 1? This is a GREAT place to demonstrate it.

Attention

The subject of the e-mail is RoofWright: Banana-man and the First Conservatory. It might be a terrible title, but there’s a good chance that people will open it to find out what on earth I’m talking about.

Interest

The body of the story is interesting to many of our customers – it’s relevant to them

Desire

This isn’t a “hard” sales letter, but it’s aimed at people who already know about RoofWright and haven’t got round to trying it yet. These e-mails often result in a number of trials, each of which is worth a significant amount when it becomes a sale, which it often does.

Action

I tell them what to do (in this case visit www.roofwright.com, or reply). No-one receiving this e-mail is in any doubt of what they need to do next.

E-mail Marketing Software

A good e-mail marketing program makes it easy to setup e-mail lists and create and send marketing e-mails. It also allows you to track the results of your e-mail campaign. But why can’t you just use your usual e-mail program?

Using your usual e-mail program

Sending e-mails from your usual e-mail program is fine, but it has its limitations. The e-mails will look like they have been bulk sent and will not have that personal touch. If a prospect opens an e-mail and sees their name, they are far more likely to read on than if it says ‘Dear Customer’ or no salutation at all.

If you do send e-mails out to multiple customers from your usual e-mail program, remember to use the blind copy function. Sending e-mails in the ‘To’ or ‘Cc’ rows will enable the customers to see each other’s e-mail addresses – this may even be breaking the Data Protection Act.

Advantages of E-mail Marketing Software

Good e-mail marketing software is not only easy to use but it also has many advantages over traditional e-mail programs. The main ones are:

Easy to subscribe
Pre-written campaigns / follow ups
Personalisation
Confirmed Opt-in
Ability to unsubscribe
Reports

Easy to Subscribe

Filling in a form on our website will send the details to our e-mail marketing software which will add you on to our RoofWright Prospect e-mail list. We don’t have to do anything; we just get an e-mail letting us know when someone has signed up.

Personalisation

E-mail marketing software not only allows you to put the customer’s name in the subject of the e-mail, but also within the e-mail:

‘So Fred, to pre-register for information, or buy a ticket, simply visit: www.glasstalk.co.uk’

This gives your e-mails a personal touch and a more conversational tone which generally helps build a relationship between you and the customer.

What is Confirmed Opt-in?

This can also be known as double opt-in. A new subscriber signs up to your mailing list through a web form and a confirmation e-mail is sent to verify it was really them. This ensures that no one can subscribe someone else in error or deliberately, either as a prank or maliciously. This means that everyone in your list really wants to be there.

Unsubscribe

You don’t want to keep people on your list who don’t want to be there. And you don’t want people to mark your e-mails as junk or spam. The simple solution is to allow people to unsubscribe or opt-out.

Many programs offer the person unsubscribing the opportunity to say why they are unsubscribing. This information is very valuable as it can help you tailor your e-mails to your audience. If you get lots of people unsubscribing for the same reason you can look at adjusting your style, frequency or content.

However, every time someone unsubscribes, don’t take it too personally. You can’t please everyone. Some people may just have subscribed to get the free report or special deal you were offering when they subscribed and have no interest in your product anyway.

Reports

All good e-mail software produces reports. These include things like tracking the number of subscribers and those that choose to unsubscribe. Or how many e-mails were opened and how many people clicked on the links within it.

Here’s an example of a report from an e-mail we sent out recently.

We sent it to 3326 people; it was opened by 507 people (this was taken shortly after the e-mail was sent and some people only read their e-mail once a day or less) and there were 19 clicks on the links. This particular software will even tell you the actual individuals who opened it.