10 Terrific Uses of E-mail

Although it’s still new territory for most catalogers, e-mail marketing can work extremely well in conjunction with catalog mailing programs. This month we offer 10 tips to make the most effective use of your e-mail marketing campaigns.

1. Get registrations and opt-ins. Successful e-mail marketers concentrate on prompting prospects and customers to register their e-mail addresses for future mailings. (A common technique is to get registrations through a sweepstakes or online contest.)

Once customers have registered or opted-in, the ideal number and frequency of follow-up mailings will vary by type of offer. (For more on this, see “24 Tips for E-mail Marketing Success,” November 2001, Catalog Success, or log on to the article archive site at www.catalogsuccess.com.)

2. Test a few different approaches. The cost of changing creative content in e-mail is a fraction of the cost in regular mail campaigns. Indeed, e-mail is the perfect medium to test different offers.

Use the e-mail’s subject line to test offers such as free shipping, a free gift with purchase or a percentage savings off the purchase price. Also test different price points and types of merchandise (i.e., hard goods vs. apparel). Customers may be more responsive to specific items offered in an e-mail than to similar products offered in a print catalog.

You may find that existing customers are attracted to different merchandise and offers than prospects. Separately track responses from each group for each test.

3. Use e-mail to promote specific products. E-mail can be used to target specific products for sale, including:

*top-selling items for which inventory availability is not a

problem;

*leftover merchandise from last season for which there’s not enough inventory to warrant putting back in the catalog; and

*poor-selling items that require discounting to sell. You’ll realize a higher recovery of cost by selling through an e-mail campaign than by selling to a liquidator.