Case Study #1:
Don’t Underestimate a Small List
Since we’ve all been
brainwashed into believing we need enormous lists of tens of thousands
to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, we naturally underestimate
small lists.
For example, do you
think it’s even worth emailing a list of 45 contacts?
I bet your first
thought was, “No. It’s not worth the effort to write and send an email
to a list that small.” In fact, many businesses make that decision
every single day.
By making that false
assumption, you’re leaving money on the table! How much money? Based on
my experience, you could be missing out on over $1K. That’s how much
one of our clients, a chiropractor in San Francisco, generated from a
list of merely 45 prospective patients.
We didn’t do anything
fancy either. We simply drafted and sent a 3-part email sequence to the
45 contacts to promote a 50%-off first time patient “Summer Tune-Up”
service. The campaign had a defined start and end date so we announced
the promotion, sent a reminder a week later, and then a final reminder
right before the deadline.
Oh and I should mention
these emails were 100% text with no graphical design. If you can type a
basic email, then you can run this email promotion to your own list. It
really was that simple and our client was able to bring in just over
$1K in new business from only 45 contacts.
OK, I’ll admit the list
of 45 contacts were not cold. The contacts had heard of our client
because they filled out a contact form on the website. That brings us
to the next case study…
Case Study #2:
It’s Never Too Late To Start
If you have a list (big
or small) that you rarely email or haven’t emailed in several years,
then you’re going to like this case study.
We worked with an
e-commerce company that had an email list of about 14,000 customers.
When I first heard that number my ears certainly perked up. However,
later I learned that the vast majority of those customers were over 2
years old and hadn’t heard from our client for that entire time.
In other words, this
list was ice cold! There was a very good chance the customers didn’t
even remember our client’s brand or product.
Here’s what we did to
overcome this problem…
First, we ran what I
call a “Warm Up” campaign. This was a series of just 2 emails that
re-introduced our client’s company, reminded the customers about the
product they had purchased 2 years ago, explained that we’ll be staying
in touch more frequently now via email, and most importantly, provided
an easy way to opt out so we didn’t follow up with anyone that did not
want any more of our client’s emails.
Sure, we lost a fair
chunk of our list that didn’t want to receive any more emails, but
that’s the price you pay for not staying in touch for over 2 years.
From that point
forward, we knew we had a warmed up list that actually wanted to
receive more emails from our client.
Next, it was time to
run an email promotion. In this particular case, our client had
refurbished products they wanted to sell at a discount ($99) over the
brand new product (regularly $299). This was a straight forward
discount promotion we ran over 4 days, similar to the case study above.
We announced the
promotion to the list, sent a reminder, and then followed up right
before the deadline. After the dust settled, we tallied up more than
$20K in sales! Not too bad considering just a few weeks prior to the
promotion our client thought their list was worthless. :)
I hope you can see from
these two examples that no list is too small or too cold to generate sales.
With those excuses out of the way, it’s time to take action!
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