The Mayoros Agency Advertising Blog

Here’s the latest rundown on Spam email.  According to the MessageLabs intelligence Security Report for July 2010, 88.9% of all email sent in June was Spam.  That’s a lot of spam email and you don’t want your email marketing message to get lost in all that junk.  You also don’t want to get in trouble by violating the CAN SPAM act. 

Here are some simple steps to making sure your email message are getting delivered.

1. Use a reputable service provider to send mass emails.  If the service provider your looking at doesn’t require you to electronically sign a no spam pledge, doesn’t automatically remove unsubscribers from the list, will allow you to put people who have requested no email contact back on your list, or doesn’t provide an automatic opt out system, its time to find a new email provider.  Any company that doesn’t follow these basic procedures is open to having their servers blacklisted and even if you follow proper procedures and email best practices, your email could get labeled as spam, simply because your provider’s servers are on the black list.  We’ll be happy to talk with you about our rates for managing your email campaign.

2. Follow email marketing best practices, as described in our previous post.

3. To comply with CAN SPAM, make sure each message you send includes an opt out method, a physical address where someone can reach you by mail, and is not deceiving in nature.  We can walk you through additional CAN SPAM basics, but like with any law there are some gray areas like co-branded marketing campaigns that would require some real legal advice.  If you stick to sending to your own permission-based list, you won’t run into problems with CAN SPAM.

Three steps, mostly simple, to make sure your emails have the best chance of reaching your customers and prospects.

We get a lot of email newsletters, sometimes from clients, sometimes from other business owners we know.  Here are a few quick tips to help make sure your email newsletter helps grow your business rather than annoys them.

• Don’t sign them up without asking. This includes sending a message to someone saying I’ve signed you up for my newsletter, you can opt out at any time.  Get permission first.
• Tell them up front what to expect.  If you want to send once a week, let people know.  If you intend to send once a month, like we do, then let them know.
• Use different lists for different purposes.  While we occasionally send a survey or special announcement to our newsletter list, we’ve received hundreds of random alerts from other lists that were supposed to only be a monthly newsletter.  An occasional extra message is fine.  A constant stream of them is a problem.  You’ll end up with a bunch of spam complaints and people opting out.  You can create a newsletter list and an alerts list.  Let people pick if they want to recieve one or both of these.
• Remove people who request it.  Not only is it illegal (violates the CanSPAM act) to not remove people who request it, it just doesn’t make sense to drive away a customer who might rather keep up to date using Facebook, Twitter or an RSS feed from your blog.  And don’t put someone who has unsubscribed back on your list.

Follow those simple tips and you’ll keep your list pretty healthy, which means your open and response rates should improve.

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Our March newsletter has been out for a little while.  If you haven’t signed up yet for our email newsletter, your missing advertising and marketing advice and data that you won’t find on this blog.  Here’s what we included in the March newsletter.

• Be Careful Cashing in on Big Events
• Surprising Facts about American Households with $100,000+ Incomes
• Hispanics Catching Up in Internet Use

A good read from the Wall Street Journal on Free Food Prizes and how they are paying off for companies like Denny’s. 

Giveaways are an inexpensive way for companies to stretch their marketing dollars during the recession. Contestants also tend to brag about the sport of entering free food contests.

Prize giveaways like these don’t have to be limited to restaurants and they are a great way to gather email addresses for permission-based email campaigns.  According to the article, 75% of the 600,000 people who entered the Denny’s contest also joined their email list to receive coupons, menu updates, etc.  Do a little math and the cost of the contest before advertising works out to paying about 0.3 cents per email address.  Convert 5% just once for a regular price Grand Slam Breakfast and $2 beverage and Denny’s nets $93,013 in profit.  Not Bad.

That’s a big scale promotion.  Most companies don’t have a chance at picking up 450,000 email addresses, but the potential for positive ROI from a contest giveaway of your own product is certainly very promising.

Not for non-numbers people, here’s an expanded and more technical breakdown of the ROI of such a marketing tactic.  Note: The Restaurant Association will tell you that they only make 4% on each dollars spent, which is probably true after expenses.  But you can’t allocate fixed costs like staff and electricity in this situation because those don’t chance with or without a contest winner.  Only variable costs (mostly food) do.

The “Grand Slam for a Year” prize is worth $311 per winner.  But restaurant markups on food are between 40-60%.  So figure the actual cost is only $156 per winner.  But only about half of free food vouchers end up being used, so the real cost is only $78.  That’s about 13 trips to Denny’s.  The average breakfast party sizes run around 2 people, so assuming a second eater arrives with the free eater and they occupied seats normally left empty, the second eater is likely to spend $6 on their own Grand Slam Breakfast and $2 on a drink.  The free eater is also likely to spring for a $2 drink.  Gross margins on drinks can be up to 90%.  Gross profit from free diner = $1.20.  Gross profit from extra diner = $4.20.  Total and beverage cost for two is $6.40.  Cost of the promotion is roughly $28.60 per winner or $1,487 for all 52 winners.  Cost per email address is 0.3 cents. 

Many small businesses still wonder why they should use email marketing.  The answer is simple.  It works.  In fact, it may work better than just about any other type of marketing effort, as long as you are trying to keep past customers buying and convert leads interested enough to accept your emails. 

According to the Direct Marketing Association’s most recent study, email marketing returned $43.62 for every dollar spent on it.  For comparison, direct mail, the most comparable category, returned $15.22 for every dollar spent in 2009. 

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 91% of Internet users use email. Pew also reported this January that 74% of Americans are regular users of the Internet. So, email effectively reaches 64% of all Adult Americans. And most, though not all, are willing to invite trusted companies to continue to send them email.

Sure email doesn’t deliver new leads very well.  Anti-Spam regulations make it necessary to get recipients permission before sending them email, something the Post Office doesn’t require of stamped mail.  However, email is now the ideal medium for reaching out and staying in touch with current and past customers or clients.