Spring 2010

You’ve Got Mail!

Emailing your customers is a great way to boost sales and drive traffic to your store. However, do you know what constitutes an effective email message? This email blast from retailer Martha Holbrook of Rosebud Cottage in Franklin, NC, walks you through the basics.

1. Website: rosebudcottagenc.com; Blog and Facebook page.
Add good, contextual links back to your store. They are great for web traffic and to generate additional interest in your store.

2. Valentine’s Gift Ideas.
Give customers a sneak peek into the season’s promising finds. This call to customers will get vital foot traffic in through the door. Such announcements need careful attention to your customers’ buying preferences and tastes so make sure you track them through your POS system or otherwise.

3. Save 25% on one in-stock item with this coupon.
Always include a call to action. Have customers use a coupon; attend an event. Sending coupons also encourages traffic to the store.

4. Forward to a Friend.
Martha encourages customers to forward the coupon to friends—a smart way to track in more traffic. Even better, it increases your customer email database and delivers qualified customer leads to you.

More Useful Tips

Always list your store name, street address, email address and phone number in the email.

Use few images, and make sure all the important information is copy. Lots of people (and email clients) block images from being seen immediately—so if your entire email is an image, they won’t see anything when it’s opened. Make sure what the email is trying to sell or promote is clear.

You have to follow certain rules when you send out mass emails. This is the most important one: Give customers a one-click opt-out. You don’t want to get in trouble for something so innocuous.

Encourage customers to add your email address to their address book—so every email you send them—regardless of content—gets delivered to the Inbox and not relegated to the Spam folder.

Use an email system that gives great tracking. You need to know who’s opening the email, what they’re clicking on and who they’re forwarding it to—if you don’t have good tracking, how do you know that what you’re doing is working?