VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Lesson from a VR500 Winner: Display Your Award & Get More Email Sign Ups

Every quarter we honor VerticalResponse customers for their email marketing excellence via our VR500 award program, and from time to time I like to feature winners who do cool things to celebrate their success.

A recent VR500 award winner, Victorian Etc., caught my attention with their creative use of the award badge. We provide a badge to winners so they can post their achievement on their website, blog, social media and more. Well, Victorian Etc. took it one step further and placed the badge on a Victorian image (how appropriate for them!). Then, they used the award to encourage additional newsletter sign-ups on their optin form by saying, "Our Newsletter is Award Winning!" Now that's a great way to make an award really work for your business.

Here's a little background about the VR500 Winner, and how they used email marketing and social media to grow their business in one year:

Victorian Etc. is an online magazine focused on the Victorian era, and current websites related to that theme. It's a quarterly publication and the first issue was released in January of 2010.

 

Victoria & Jeff Otto (editor and publisher of Victorian Etc.,) faced many challenges of being an internet startup, mainly struggling to get their website noticed. So, they quickly worked to grow their presence with email. Through VerticalResponse email marketing, Twitter, Facebook, and their blog, they have driven tons of traffic to their website and average over 10,000 page views per month. "This is immeasurable exposure for our first year on the web," said Victoria Otto.

"The fact that our readers are given notice of contests, articles, and current events through our email newsletter makes VerticalResponse our biggest connection to our audience," she added. "Email marketing is the most affordable way to get the word out to our supporters, and VerticalResponse seems to be the only company which allows businesses to buy only what they need as they grow their clientele."

Victorian Etc. plans to continue to promote their VR500 Award and use email marketing and social media to spread knowledge of this historical gilded era, and get the word out about their business.

How have you promoted the success of your business to your customers and readers? I'm interested to know what works for you.

Related posts:

Behind the Scenes with a VR500 Email Award Winner

3 Ways Any Employee Can be Your Best Salesperson

Using Industry Awards to Effectively Grow Your Business

7 Steps to Running a Successful Contest for Your Business

Recently the VR Marketing Team has held a few different contests for our users. And in the process they're discovering lots of great learnings you can leverage for your business! Running a contest can be fun for you and your customers if planned and executed correctly. It can also help generate some exciting buzz for your biz.

Here's 7 Tips to Run a Successful Contest for Your Business:

1. Create Your Contest: Before you get started, it's helpful to define your contest. It can be as simple as a giveaway, like asking trivia questions about your business on Twitter and giving away free goodies for correct answers. Or, you can get more complex and ask your customers to submit videos or photos of them with your product or service.
   
   
2. Define Your Goal: Having a goal is important because it helps you stay on target. As an example, we ran a Email Template Design Challenge earlier this year. Our goal was to engage customers and encourage them to submit email marketing templates, as well as create buzz by mobilizing their social networks and asking for their friends to vote for their template via Facebook Likes. By keeping our goal in mind we stayed focused and did not try to do too many things that would take away from our main objective.
   
   
3. Set Success Metrics: If you don't define what success means, how will you know if your contest is working? Examples of success metrics for the Template Design Challenge were: Getting viable contest submissions, creating buzz on social media and getting people to vote, as well as placing the email templates in the VR product and having customers use them after the contest. If you're doing a giveaway through Twitter your success metrics will probably be the number of Tweets and Re-Tweets you get. You might also want to track if you gain any new followers.
   
   
4. Write the Rules: When running a contest it's important to have clearly defined rules so contestants don't get confused. When writing your rules it's advised to consult your legal expert if you have one, or a third party compliance sweepstakes service (many of which are available online for a small fee). Once your rules are established it's best not to change them, and make sure your rules are easily accessible to all possible entrants. Keep in mind that if you're running your contest on Facebook there are specific rules and regulations to follow. Here's the Facebook Contests page with more information.
   
   
5. Promote Your Contest: Now for the super fun stuff - promoting your contest! First, define your audience and find out where they are. For example, we promoted our Email Template Design Challenge to our customers via email marketing, social media and blog posts. We also went after design audiences by way of local art & design schools, and the use of design hashtags on Twitter (i.e., #design). This allowed us to reach a larger audience that would certainly be interested in a design challenge and as a result we got heaps of impressive submissions! If you're offering a prize, be sure to promote that, too.
   
   
6. Analyze Your Results: Once your contest period is over it's time to analyze your results and determine the winner(s). Here's an example of what our voting page (with likes and all!) looked like when we closed the contest.
   
   
   
   You'll notice that the templates got 2,484 Likes total. Each time someone voted via a Facebook Like it showed up on their Facebook stream and provided us a lot of visibility. We also monitored Twitter and received several hundred Tweets about the challenge. But the ultimate testament to the challenge was if our customers were using the templates. Well, good news! The top 3 winning templates have been in our app for just over a month now, and altogether they have been selected over 1,000 times!
   
   
7. Fulfill Your Promise: Once you determine your winner(s) share the good news with your customers. Again, we did this through email, social media, and a blog post. Also, send a nice, personal email to the winner(s). Thank them for their participation, and let them know that their prize is on its way (if applicable). Also, make sure you meet whatever deadlines for fulfillment you specified in the rules. And voila! Your contest is complete.

Do you run contests for your customers? What have your experiences been? Or, are you planning to run a contest? I'm interested to hear about your experience!

Behind the Scenes with a VR500 Email Award Winner

Taylor Dance Center is the third place winner of the 2010 Q4 VR500 Awards for Email Marketing Excellence! We went behind the scenes with them and conducted an interview about their email marketing program. Melissa Gosling of Taylor Dance Center provided some good insight into how email marketing has helped their business. She also has some tips you can use for your business, too!

VR: Before we get started, can you provide a little background about your business?

Melissa Gosling: Taylor Dance Center is a dance studio located north of Dallas in McKinney, TX. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary. There are about 300 families at our studio. 

VR: Was there an obstacle you were trying to overcome that lead you to email marketing?

Melissa Gosling: Our biggest issue was communication. We didn't have an easy or cost effective way to keep our families informed about what was going on. This was a major issue for us. 

VR: How did you get started with email marketing?

Melissa Gosling: We jumped right in and started our email campaigns in October - right after school started. We send out newsletters once a month with important and helpful information for our student's parents.

VR: Do you have any advice you'd like to share with other small businesses about email marketing?

Melissa Gosling: My biggest tip is to make sure the information is timely and relevant to your customers. If they think they will get something useful from the email, they will make sure they read it. But if it has a lot of useless information, you will lose that reader. We use content of our own, and include links to useful information we find on the internet.

VR: What kind of results have you seen?

Melissa Gosling: We ran a customer satisfaction survey in our last newsletter and had some interesting finds:

1. 87% of our respondents said email newsletters are the number one way they stay informed with our business.
2. 98% of respondents said they preferred to use the email newsletter to stay updated (Facebook was second at 25%).

We have been told that people feel much more informed since we implemented the newsletter, and that has greatly improved our customer satisfaction. 

VR: What does your VR500 Award mean to you?

Melissa Gosling: We were honored to receive the award, as email marketing is new to us. As a small business we have to watch every nickel and dime that we spend, so it is great news that our results are great - but more importantly that our customers feel taken care of!

VR: Thanks so much for sharing your email marketing success story, Melissa!

For more insight into their email marketing campaigns, check out their February newsletter: Taylor Dance Center News. You can also find Taylor Dance Center on Twitter and Facebook.

Discover more VerticalResponse customer success stories on our Case Studies page. And check out or VR500 Awards page to find out how you can be eligible to win.

Case Study: LockPickShop Uses Email Marketing To Boost Facebook Fan Base and Bring in Revenue

 

We are often asked about successes with email marketing from other businesses so we decided to start publishing more email marketing case studies from various industries. This is a great one about how a the LockPickShop used email marketing to increase their social media following and ultimately sell their products.

Background

LockPickShop.com supplies a number of businesses & organizations with lock picking and auto entry tools. And no, not to thieves, their customer base includes locksmiths, students of the trade, US Military and first responders. Another major part of their customer base is made up of law enforcement personnel such as Police departments, Homeland Security, the FBI, and the DEA.

LockPickShop is also a large supplier of props for TV shows such as Law and Order, CSI, and Bones. Glynn Gallagher owns the company and operates it by herself, through the help of a fulfillment center for shipping and invoices.

"When you see a television show or a movie where someone is breaking into a car or a home, it’s likely the tools came from the LockPickShop," said Glynn Gallagher, Owner, LockPickShop.

Problem

When LockPickShop started 10 years ago, Gallagher did not have much knowledge of formal marketing techniques. Prior to using email marketing, LockPickShop was primarily advertising on specialty forums for locksmiths and using Google AdWords.

The LockPickShop is a very niche business, and needed to expand their customer base and ensure more customers were connecting with them through social media. Gallagher decided to try email marketing two years ago in order to meet those goals.

Discovery

Although Gallagher was new to email marketing, she was convinced it would be a good tactic for her small business. Initially, she decided to test out several different email marketing companies, and see which one she liked best.

"I went through the trial program for three email marketing companies, and chose to stay with VerticalResponse because it was easy and didn’t make my head hurt!" said Gallagher.

Solution

In October 2009, she decided to embrace social media and start a Facebook group for her business. To jump-start the Facebook page for LockPickShop, Gallagher launched an email marketing campaign asking her customers to become 'Fans' or 'Like' the LockPickShop Facebook page. There were no Facebook Fans at the time the email went out, and within five days she had over 300 Facebook Fans. A whopping 250 of these joined in the first 48 hours.

After the success of this first email, Gallagher decided to send out a second email to customers who had not yet joined her Facebook page, asking them to do so. She was advised to keep emails simple with one key message for her customers. So Glynn sent an email asking them to join the Facebook page. Within one day LockPickShop gained another 125 Facebook Fans, and now is at over 800.

"The email I sent out was my most successful email ever," said Gallagher. "I’m shocked by the quick results and this really proves to me that email marketing and social media really do work well together."

Results

For the first email she sent, Gallagher achieved a 17% open rate, and 9.06% click through rate. Gallagher also included a discount code in the email, which was used by 34 customers to make a purchase.

"Sales attributed to the email marketing campaign were an unexpected surprise because our business sells locksmith tools. You’d expect that sending out a Halloween email about locksmith tools would not generate any revenue, but this didn’t happen," said Glynn Gallagher, Owner, LockPickShop. "As a result of the coupon we offered, we finished with $3000 in revenue from one email campaign.

Gallagher attributes more than 10% of LockPickShop’s revenue to email marketing. When she sends an email campaign, Gallagher sees the number of website visitors quadruple for a 24-hour period.

Social Media Partnerships Can Increase Awareness

One of the list building tactics that we have discussed on the blog before for your email marketing is to partner with another business and feature each other in your email newsletter.

I saw this Facebook message from one of our customers last week and thought it was a fantastic example of how you could do the exact same thing to build your social media following.

Satya Jewelry is a New York based jewelry design company. They partnered with Buddha Nose, a New York organic body care store. They launched a Facebook-only campaign, that offered $100 from each business in a sweepstakes. All you needed to do was give them an email address, first name, last name and birthday month to be entered.

They created an opt-in form and posted it on each one of their Facebook Fan Pages with a little description to introduce the other business to their current followers. Everyone who entered was encouraged to become a fan of the other business on Facebook and agreed to be added to both Satya Jewelry & Buddha Nose’s email marketing list.

Have you tried partnering with another business? Did you find any success?

How We Won Gold in the MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Awards

Last month we won gold in the MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Awards for ‘Best Dynamic Content or Personalized Email for our Social Media Series’ email messages. I feel really great about this award because we won over companies like Microsoft.

The reason we made it to the podium for this award was because of the way we built our email list. We created a list that we knew would be interested in our Social Media Series, which gave us amazing open and click through rates for every campaign.

When we launched the campaign back in October we announced our series everywhere we could think of. In our email marketing newsletter, on our social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and in our community, our VR Marketing Lounge just to name a few. We used up all of our resources up front. This did two things for us. First of all we had people signing up for a webinar that was schedule for February, 4 months after we launched the campaign to build our social media webinar list, which minimized the work we had to do at the end of the project. And then we had a new list of over 2,000 people who we knew were interested in social media topics.

Once I had this list I would send an email invite for the next social media webinar about a week before the webinar. On average these invites had above a 30% open rate. As you know, anything above 20% you can consider really good, so 30% was fantastic! After every webinar the list grew because more and more people were recommending and finding the webinar series.

We would also send follow up emails to everyone who attended and registered but couldn’t make it. These follow ups all had 40%+ open rates and click rates that ranged from 20% to 49%. These are the award-winning numbers.

By building your list from scratch and presenting your audience with content they are interested in you can get real results. If you have already built your list try using the list segmentation tool to accomplish a similar effect. It’s all about how much you know about your audience.

Case Study: ValuePetSupplies Increases Revenue Ten-Fold with Email Marketing to Customers

At VerticalResponse we asked our customers what type of information they wanted from us. The answer? More case studies! You all want to know how other VerticalResponse customers are using email marketing and what they're getting out of it. So we've started to talk to our customers to find out and we start our case study series with a retailer out of Tennessee, ValuePetSupplies.com.

Background

As part of their family pet business, the Piech family started ValuePetSupplies.com. Their goal is to offer pet-related products for the pet owner’s everyday needs at the most competitive prices possible. ValuePetSupplies.com is 100 percent online–and ships from a family-owned warehouse in Livingston, TN.

Problem

ValuePetSupplies.com uses search engine marketing and social media to generate leads. Even though they were advanced in these areas, as of January 2009 ValuePetSupplies.com wasn’t running any customer retention programs. Zachary Piech, Owner of ValuePetSupplies.com, could see this was a problem based on the company’s customer retention rates.

Discovery

Piech shared his problem with a friend of his, and was lucky enough to have chosen a VerticalResponse advocate! His friend sat him down at a computer and supervised while Piech signed up for VerticalResponse and sent his first campaign. After Piech launched the first email marketing campaign, he was convinced this was something he needed to do.

After sending out a few successful campaigns in January and February, Piech was so impressed with his return on investment that he hired a marketing and sales manager to manage his marketing and retention programs. 

Solution

ValuePetSupplies.com now sends out an average of 30 email campaigns a month with VerticalResponse to a customer base of over 100,000. “We start our campaigns the first of every month and probably have five or six campaigns going at a time, each targeted to specific types of buyers,” said Nick Carter, Marketing and Sales Manager for ValuePetSupplies.com.

These email marketing campaigns have provided insight to ValuePetSupplies.com on which products work well in emails, and which type of customer will respond to the different offers. They use this information to segment lists and send very targeted messages.

Results

Before ValuePetSupplies.com was sending emails campaigns on a regular basis, current customers created 20% of the monthly revenue. With the help of VerticalResponse, the company has increased this to 30%. “The return on investment numbers are mind-boggling. On our monthly campaign it is not unusual to see 7595% return on investment,” said Carter.

Case Study: Test a Subject Line in 2 Minutes & Get More Clicks

Recently we did a survey on the State of Small Business, you may have received it. Our Marketing team performed a subject line test in the email. One subject line was very generic and one was a bit more specific. We split our list in half using the list segmentation tool. It took just a few extra minutes but from what we learned it was worth it.

The first subject line: Take Our Survey and Tell Us What You Think

We received 181 more opens and 35 more clicks than the following more specific subject line: Take 5 Minutes - See How Your Business Stacks Up

In this specific case it seemed to be that we had more opens and clicks from the generic subject line and more people taking our survey. This illustrates why it's important to be testing subject lines to get more opens or content inside your email to be getting more clicks.

Case Study - VR Goes Viral Again With a Music Video...Check Out These Numbers

VerticalResponse released our latest music video Nuthin' But an AppThang starring our own Furious ALF and 2Fein. Videos like this and last year's AppEx Baby are not only fun to do, they really turn into a great viral marketing tool. (Viral, that's soooo 90s). These videos are specifically designed to get the attention of Salesforce employees, partners and customers about our email marketing solution a month before the big Dreamforce Tradeshow. Anyway, I've written about why we do these videos.

I decided to put a few more dollars into the video and this year we think it worked! The shoot took 4 hour  (we storyboarded our ideas) and the editing took a day. We worked with a great team called The Big Picture.

Here's where we stand:

August 20th - We launched it internally, had a preview party and then we "viraled" it into Salesforce, that is, sent email with the link. Crowd goes wild. In minutes (on a Friday afternoon no less) it was going through the company like wildfire and our own employees were sending it to their friends like crazy.

August 21st - Alf posts it on YouTube and we start getting 100+ views a day.

August 23rd - We post it in the VR Facebook Group (we don't actually know how many views we get because it's not hosted by YouTube but this is a must do.)

End of the first week: We had 1000 views.

August 28th - We post it in every group or event that is related to Salesforce on Facebook. We send it in a VerticalResponse email marketing campaign to a small subset of users, another 35 views, we include it in the email newsletter to everyone on the sidebar...another 120 views.

Viewing slows down around Labor Day but picks up again to 100 views a day.

By end of this past week we were at 2600 views on YouTube alone.

September 10 we sent out another newsletter and posted on Facebook to help us get to 10,000 views. By September 13 we're at close to 3,000. Probably won't get to 10k but it's sure picking up.

By September 16, we're at 3,025 views and loving it.

In all of the last year and a half our old video "AppEx Baby" got 4400 views, those also started to pick up as a result of these efforts and are now over 4700. All in all a success so far, and it's not over.  For not that much of a spend, we're getting our name and message out there. And no, it's not a million veiws but for a B2B video it's pretty darn good. Isn't word of mouth great? Email marketing and other forms of social media are really the culprit in this effort.

Our mission? To get to 10,000 views. Can you help? Watch the video and tell your friends!

Case Study: Results from an Email Webinar Invitation

A few weeks ago we did a webinar about our Salesforce.com integration. It went great. We use GoToWebinar, a pretty cool product. Check them out for yourself.  I asked Kara who ran the webinar here at VR about some of the metrics that surround using email marketing to drive people to register for and attend the webinar. Here's what we came up with.

We posted a link on our site, the VRU area of our site, a week or two before we did the webinar.
We got 208 clicks.

We then did a newsletter out to a targeted list of users in our database.
Total sent:      2700
Total opens:     766 (28%)
Total clicks:     152 (5.6% great click rate!)

Total clicks for the entire webinar "2-week campaign":     361 clicks
Total people who registered for the webinar:                   153 people (42%)
Total attendees the day of the webinar:                             75 (49%)

I think these are some really great numbers for us to start benchmarking our webinar series to test out new things.

Here are a few things I think would be really great to test going forward:

• Start mailing earlier, 2-4 weeks, and do a re-mail of the original campaign to the non-responders.
• Put the specific webinar link on the home page (right now we have a "general VRU" description.)

You might want to use our metrics and see how you compare. If you've got any ideas on how we might increase our rates, let us know!