The benefits of a long term
email marketing campaign conducted in a thoroughly professional manner will have an identifiable effect on every aspect of your business. There is no other customer-attracting opportunity, online or in any conventional form, that can approach the levels of impact and ROI like a properly implemented and well-designed email marketing campaign. The launch of a successful email campaign requires attention to the following important factors.
Implementation
Conventional and traditional forms of advertising such as radio, television, newspapers, magazines and Yellow Page listings are subject to a different set of legal criteria than email marketing. These differences are especially notable when considering how your party supply business' consumers are placed on subscription lists and their requests honored.
Compliance
Every party supply business has some form of customer data collection process. Once data is collected, clear, full and unequivocal permission is required from the customer before any of their personal information can be placed in your computer systems' emailing list.
CAN-SPAM Violations Are Serious
In the United States, the legislation determining what aspects of a business' email policies are legal is known as the
CAN-SPAM Act. This law protects the right of any individual to be immediately deleted from an email subscription list upon their first notice. Any party supply business found in violation of this legislation opens themselves up to severe legal penalties and even prison.
Facilitate Unsubscriptions
All email marketing campaign sends must by law contain a clearly visible and easily accessible link to an unsubscription page. Your party supply business must irrevocably act upon any subscriber removal request immediately, at the risk of legal sanctions.
Manage Bouncing Emails
Any email sent out by your party supply business, regardless of whether it is a personal or commercial reply or a campaign newsletter, is subject to one of the following three occurrences:
Successful delivery.
Delayed delivery due to your recipient's full inbox, network bottlenecks or other factors outside of your control. Also known as a soft bounce, in this case it is considered good email practice to attempt to contact the customer via any alternate means and make them aware of the problem.
A hard bounce resulting from blocked or outright non-existent email addresses. Once you receive the notification from the Mailer Daemon that your email has undergone a hard bounce, any further attempts to resend to that address will raise a red flag for traffic routing ISPs. If identified as a spammer, your company will then be placed on a blacklist, making delivery of any future emails nearly impossible.
Privacy Policy
Copying a privacy policy from a commensurate competitor's website can lead to legal liability and penalization in search results. Do not ever copy a privacy policy. Instead, enlist an industry-specific business attorney to craft a distinct policy representing your online operations.
Segment Your List
If you are operating a party supply store in San Diego, your territory might encompass zip code 92179 where the average annual income is $6,411. Just a few miles away, in zip code 92130, the median resident earns $1,150,076 per year. Does it make sense to promote your tent party services complete with black tie and celebrity chef to prepare the seven course gourmet tasting to the former group, or your sale on six for a dollar streamers to the latter?
Email segmentation allows you to separate these groups and create specific newsletter content appealing directly to distinct needs and income parities.
Split Test Your Ongoing Content
The A/B split test is one of the most effective and widespread tests available to email marketers and allows you to determine how your customers respond to particular elements within a message. The effect of changing a single factor in an email, such as the image positioning or preheader, can be analyzed by reviewing the primary
email metrics such as open and click-through rates. By repeated A/B split testing analysis, you will be able to clearly identify the email elements that are most effective and utilize them to obtain the best results.
Capture Your Customer's Personal Data
Just like the rest of the population, most of your customers do not want to reveal any personal data unless it is absolutely necessary. By the very nature of the industry, the customers of party supply businesses are far less likely to want to reveal data such as birthdate than would the clients of an enterprise such as a medical or health facility. It thus becomes increasingly critical for the party supply owner or manager to provide incentives for subscribers to fill out the signup form in full and enter accurate data in each field. Every bit of information about any client who has agreed to receive your
email marketing newsletters is critical, as each entry equals a new opportunity to further segment your list.
Analyze Your Customer's Behavior
There are three primary subscriber types.
Customers who never open your emails and should be removed from your subscription list.
Customers who may open and read your emails but generally fail to respond to your call to action. These subscribers should remain on your list, as they may be responding to your business in other ways such as location drop-ins or by phone.
Customers who both read your emails and respond to your call to action. These subscribers are the most responsive from an email marketing perspective, and thus are extremely valuable as online clients.
Best Email Practices
Party supply businesses should strive to adhere to
best email practices. Following these principles can help optimize the returns of your campaign:
Compose preheaders and subject lines with careful consideration and care
Use a modern email template that can handle video and the differing display capacities of browsers and web enabled mobile devices
Provide multiple landing pages featuring specifically targeted content to synchronize with your segmentation efforts and A/B split testing
