Tip #4

Use Email marketing: What would you spend to create an additional $278,000 in sales volume? Would you spend nothing? Many of you did (in part).

The SpaBoom email marketing program is free to SpaBoom clients and we can directly attribute over a quarter million dollars in (2007) sales to our email marketing campaigns, which are 100% free. While most of you benefited in some way, the lion's share of that volume went to 10% of SpaBoom clients. Let me briefly explain how and why:

First of all, unless you turn the email marketing feature off, every time one of your clients buys an Instant Gift Certificate (IGC), they get a chance to opt-in to your email marketing list. If they buy the IGC from Spa Emergency, they can opt in to the national list as well. Thus, we are patiently collecting email address on your behalf. While that may be helpful, we take it a few steps further for you. We also draft outbound email marketing messages (as well as newsletters) on your behalf that are periodically sent to your list, from you. (It is important to note that this feature can be turned off at any time.) Consequently, if you do nothing, we are automatically collecting email addresses and sending your clients timely messages from you reminding them about the wonders of last minute spa gift certificates from your website as a holiday (Valentine's Day or the like) approaches.

So why do the top tier get so much of the benefit? Let's start with the list we are sending to. If you sell 120 online gifts a year to 80 people (I am assuming some repeat business) and 90% of them opt in, that leaves you with 71 folks on your email list at the end of the first year. I'll bet most of you have a bigger email list than that, and if you don't, you should! The easiest, simplest thing you can do to make email marketing more effective is to to grow your list. We have a (free) tool to import your existing email list into the SpaBoom application. If you have 300 email addresses, we can import them and make any campaign you create much more effective simply by delivering it to more people.

The next step the super-SpaBoomers often take is to customize their campaigns. All they (or you) have to do is log into SpaBoom and modify or create any email message or newsletter you like. While our emails are professionally written, your customers will generally respond even better to a message more from you, about your specific services or offers. For a great primer on how to set up an email campaign in SpaBoom, see Andrea Feucht's post on Email Guidelines (or call her at 800.940.0458). There are tons of other email tips out there and I encourage you to read and experiment, but here are some basics:

• Let them Opt-In. Everyone on your list has (hopefully) opted in to messages from you.
• Don't email too often or over sell. Once a month is probably the right number of outbounds.
• Be consistent. Try to send on the same day an time each month (like the second Tuesday at 2:00).
• Give them a reason to open the email, generally in the subject line. Never ever use exclamation points or all capital letters. That makes you look like a mortgage merchant. You win if they open your message, even if there are no direct sales. They will remember you when they have a last minute gift need.
• Put the good stuff "above the fold" in the top half or quarter of the content.
• Newsletters are for for news. Emails are for events and specials. Try to keep them distinct.

One last thought. We provide some reports that show what email marketing campaigns produce on your behalf (click the "Reports" tab then scroll down to "Email marketing" on the bottom right of the page). This report generally provides good data, but a bug in our system prevented it from showing any sales or results for late December through Valentine's Day. It's fixed now and should be accurate going forward.

Posted in Creating Customers, Spa Marketing, Spa Business Management, General • Share • Trackback

One Response to “Top ten ways to sell more gift certificates online: Tip #5”

1. Chris Masters Says:
   March 3rd, 2008 at 4:34 pm

   One of the problems with e-mail marketing are the spam blockers on mail servers. A good way to check to see if your mail is being sent to clients is to create e-mail accounts on the most popular mail services (MSN, Yahoo!, G-mail, etc) and add yourself to the e-mail list on SpaBoom. If you don't get a promotional e-mail, or the e-mail gets routed to your junk mail, send a personal e-mail to those clients through your own e-mail service.

Leave a Reply