When email marketing first came along, everyone saw it as a low cost alternative to postal direct mail.
So it proved. However, today the hardest part of email marketing is establishing trust! When the only contact you have with someone is via an electronic email, it makes it hard to convince people you are genuine, and frankly, there are times when the delete button is just too easy to hit!
Well what can you do to establish that trust? Obviously the words you use in the email copy are critical. Here are some tips from one of my earlier articles:
How do you lose trust?
Well start by promising something unbelievable. Many MLM (Multi-level Marketing) schemes start this way. Promises of 'Become a millionaire in 6 months' destroy trust instantly.
Anonymity destroys trust. Avoid publishing an address or contact information and your visitors trust in you drops close to zero. Even many of the most well known brand names around make this fundamental mistake - and drop in the estimation of many of their visitors as a result.
A poorly designed and executed web site destroys trust. It does not need to be all singing and dancing. It does not need to have the latest plug-ins (in fact better not). It does not even need lots of graphics. It DOES need:
- Good spelling & grammar
- All links to work
- Clean and tidy layout
- Simple colour scheme
- Good HTML coding
- Testing on various browsers
A simple black on white text page with clear navigation and just a few small graphics for interest will bring more trust than the most fantastic design that is full of spelling mistakes!
But even if you do all of that, you are today competing with volumes of spam, pop up ads, 'skyscraper' ads, every which way of grabbing your potential customers attention. Your offer can fail to establish trust just because your potential customer has 'seen it all before' online.
So what else can you do? Well what about stepping back in time a few years? How about sending people something in the POST!
'Why on earth would you do that?' you ask - well two reasons - Firstly, receiving something in your hand makes the business that sent it to you 'real' - and secondly, HTMail are in the unique position of enabling you to send both postal and email mailings to the same person! By using a combined mailing of this sort, you can actually improve the take up that could be achieved by either method used on it's own. Why? Well think about this as your marketing route:
- Select a list of people likely to be interested in your offer.
- Email them some detail of your offer, and tell them to watch out for further details in the post. This adds credibility to your email, and primes them for your postal mailing. Make sure that you give them the opportunity to buy now if they wish.
- Send your postal mailing - putting physical evidence of the existence of your company in their hands. Make sure the postal mailing offers the 'what to do next route' to make your sale.
- Use HTMail's half price remail option to send a follow up email to those who did not buy. People often intend to buy, but simply forget (we are all pretty busy these days). Your reminder email is a low cost way of converting these people.
- Do it all again to a new list.
For the lowest cost highest quality way of putting something in your customers hand, take a look at our full colour postcard option.
In addition to creating new customers, you can use HTMail's new service to look after your existing customers as well. With postal mailings, spam is less of an issue, so we are able to send a postal mailing to your own in house list of customers or prospects. Or perhaps you are involved in a club or society, and need to send out membership cards or newsletters - well again, HTMail can now offer a service to suit you.
To find out more about this great new service - and check out some instant prices online - just visit http://www.htmail.com/directmail.html - and please, let me know what you think at daveb@htmail.com.
Dave Broadway
March 2006
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