VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

November iPod Shuffle Winner

Nancy Surdy, Easiest.com, wins the iPod Shuffle for November...yes still playing catch up.

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Dana, our VP of Sales, thought that this was a great use of VerticalResponse to push people back to their abandoned shopping cart. Agreed 100%!

Here’s what else we thought was great about this one:

1. Nice and clean – Can you tell we like the “less is more” theme? Text is there in the event that graphics are stripped out.

2. Great use of personalization – Both name and date are used here so that recipients know they’ve taken some sort of action with you.

3. A nice “Thank You” – It’s always great to be appreciated!

If you have the technology to get access to those who have gone so far as to put something in a shopping cart…they must like you, they must really really like you. Perhaps they were sidetracked and forgot what they were doing. It’s up to you to try at least one more time to get them to complete that order. Even if you recover a few, those customers may be customers for life.

Great job Nancy!

Any comments? Any ideas on how to get people to go back to their abandoned shopping cart?

October iPod Shuffle Winner

Doug Swett, Owner, Santi Restaurant, wins iPod Shuffle for October! And yes, it's late, but you've all been making us a bit busy here at VR this holiday season...and we thank you for that.

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Jill, one of our extremely talented Customer Relations Specialists picked this one out.  She thought  that the use of the following text in the top of the email was nice and prominent, and I totally agree.

"To view all images and links, please add Santi_Restaurant@mail.vresp.com to your address book now"

Once you've been added to your recipient's address book chances are your email will not go into the bulk folder and your images will be displayed in your email.

Here’s what else we thought interesting:

1. Calendar of Events – Great way to keep in touch with your recipients without hard-core offers.

2. Phone number – Very prominent, probably because that’s the primary way they want you to reach them.

3. Very clean look – Good use of white space with graphics. Great use of text so that if images are turned off in a recipient's email reader, you still see the important information.

4. Tell a friend – Nice to have in the email to give the recipient the idea to forward it whether they choose to use the forward link or just simply hit their browser forward button.

5. Mail date – Mailed it on a Tuesday for events occurring the rest of the week, not too close to the event but not too far in advance so recipient's might forget.

All in all a great email marketing campaign, congrats to Doug at Santi Restaurant in Geyserville, CA.

What clever reasons are you using to reach out to your recpients? We're dying to know, give us a comment!