VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

How to Put the Love in Your Valentine's Day Marketing

Valentine's Day 2012 is coming fast! According to the experts at the National Retail Federation, retail spending for the holiday will increase nearly 13 percent this year - that's huge! On top of this, the average person will spend $116.21 on traditional Valentine’s Day merchandise this year, an increase of 12.8% over 2011’s total, with expenditures on jewelry and clothing expected to rise substantially.

This makes this Valentine's Day the fourth most popular shopping holiday of the year, just behind the winter holidays of Christmas/Hanukkah, Back-to-School and Mother’s Day.

How can you share in the love-fest and reap the rewards this Valentine's Day? The good news is, no matter what industry you're in, or kind of business you have, you can capitalize on the theme. And, the time to get started is now!

Here are a few quick tips and tactics to get you and your readers feeling the love:

Work with the theme, but be a bit unexpected - Since everyone and their brother will be sending out emails with hearts, cupids and roses on them and subject lines with references to love, you'll want to ensure your emails and direct mail pieces stand out from the crowded mailboxes both online and off.

One way to catch your subscribers' attention is to put a creative spin on the theme and use the basics of content marketing 101 - tell a story to connect with your audience. For example, if you sell jewelry, tell a story behind symbolism of a particular precious stone that's used, or share a story of how a piece is created. You can even share the meanings behind Valentine's traditions or fun facts, like how many roses or how many pounds of chocolate will be sold this year. (The answer? 110 million roses and 1.1 billion boxes of chocolates will be sold throughout the U.S.) This way, you'll draw your recipient in and will hopefully get them to react.

Gift guides make shopping easy - Send an email marketing campaign or direct mail postcard with gift ideas by price point for him and her. If you're sending an email, try including a call-to-action button that encourages your readers to Buy Now. You can also use this free tool to make your own free custom button.

Use social to share the love - It's easier than ever to extend the reach of your messages to potential and new customers by sharing your email content on your social networks. Check out Roost by VerticalResponse, a free tool that lets you easily and quickly create a campaign of posts across all your social networks. The best part is you can do it all from one place and not have to log into Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn separately. You'll have your Valentine's Day campaign ready in a flash! You can also extend the life of your email campaign by sharing the hosted version to your social networks. You've spent the time to create it, now make sure as many people as possible can see it.

Be careful with your subject line - This is a great tip from our pals at the Retail Email Blog about not shortening Valentine's Day to V-Day in your subject line or tweets to save characters. V-Day has a number of meanings and associations, generally violent. Email marketers are always looking to trim characters from their subject lines, but this may not be the best way to shorten "Valentine’s Day."

How will you message your audience this Valentine's Day?

Posted by Kim Stiglitz.

Kim Stiglitz is the Director of Lifecycle Marketing at VerticalResponse. Connect with her on Twitter at @Stiggy1.

Free Stuff = New Customers + Great Word of Mouth

The word "free" is a wonderful word, isn't it? Risk-free, free shipping, buy one get one free - they're all tried and true in the world of marketing. But have you ever thought of really giving something free up front to gain a customer or great word of mouth?

I'll ask all CFOs or bean counters to stop cringing, I know, I've had the discussions with many of you. And I understand that most businesses are in business to MAKE money, not give away the store. But done right, giving away something for free can really make a difference and help your business grow (not go away).

Here are some ideas of how a few industries give things for free to gain customers.

Software Companies - What's great about online software is that you can do a lot by giving your product and digital content away to get people in the door in a limited fashion.

• Give full access to your product for free for a limited time. This takes away any tough sell questions if people can get in and really play with it.
• Offer a free downloadable guide or something that you email that adds value.
• Offer free webinars to potential customers.
• Give the first month of an online service totally free or give a few months of a service contract free. These are usually pretty inexpensive to give away.

At VerticalResponse we take it one step further, we give our email marketing product away for free to smaller non-profits. This works in many ways; Our non-profits talk us up to their friends and colleagues, and we love the fact that we give back to the community. Free is good all the way around.

Restaurants & Bars - Getting and keeping costs in line is important to all restaurant owners, but there are some things you might try to generate some neighborhood buzz.

• Offer a free appetizer of your choice from 4-6pm to get the crowds in the door early.
• Give free cookies for dessert.
• In Europe most cafes give you olives, chips, and nuts for ordering a few drinks.
• A restaurant in the Bay Area gives you free hamachi shots and free cotton candy at the end of your meal. Cotton candy is quirky enough to cause some word-of-mouth and out of 251 Yelp reviews, 70 of them mention it!

There's a restaurant in Lake Tahoe known for giving a "doggie bag" of a turkey sandwich and a pumpkin pie slice after you eat there for Thanksgiving. You still get the feeling you're eating leftovers without the hassle of cooking!

Clothing Retail - Give a cool, free reusable shopping bag for customers to carry their stuff around in. Scoop in NYC does a great job at generating buzz from the free durable shopping bags they give away plus they get some nice advertising out of the deal when people are walking around town carrying the bags. Ambaince, a women's boutique clothing store in SF, does the same thing.

Health Clubs - Health clubs can get really creative to attract customers. You can come up with a nice package to get people in the door. Here are some ideas of things to give to get people to sign on the dotted line:

• Give free SIGG gym-logo'd water bottles.
• Offer a free hour with a trainer.
• Offer $50 worth of free food at the gym's cafe.
• Give a $25 gift certificate to the gym's spa.
• Have a monthly "mixer" for your guests if they bring a friend who isn't a member.
• Offer free gifts and some healthy smoothies.

The Sports Club LA gives free guest passes to get newbies coming to the club to try it out for a few days.

These are just a few ideas for these particular business types to get customers by giving something for free. Is there something you can give away to get people in your door?

Quick Holiday Idea From a Local Salon

I ran across this nice idea from a local salon that any services business could really use. On my way out the door, I was given two business cards that had offers  printed on them with a Happy Holidays message. One was for a discount on the next haircut or color, and the other was a free treatment with the next appointment. Those are great offers.

What was really interesting to me was that it was good for January - February of next year. What a great idea for them to get business back in the door in the season that might not be so busy.

These are also pretty cheap to create. It looked like they bought business card stock from Avery, then laid out and printed them right on their business printer.

If you're doing some interesting marketing for your service business let us know what it is!

Marketing Ideas for Salons

I was talking to a hair salon owner here in San Francisco about how a salon goes about getting new customers and retaining existing ones. Wow, did I get some good ideas about marketing and selling for salon owners. Do you need some ideas for your email marketing campaigns? Check out the ones below, I think they're pretty creative.

Also, check out this post for using email for appointment reminders and this post for collecting email addresses. You might even get a good idea or two if you don't have a salon so read on...

FREE is Good

For the most part there are many things that you charge for that have pretty high margins. Consider giving these products or services away for free with a higher-priced service.

• For hair salons highlights can be expensive, why not give away something of lesser value for free, like a conditioner?

• For nail salons, what about a free manicure with a pedicure? - Do you have a time during the day when you're slow? Get people in the door with a free offer.

• Free product with a treatment - The margins on products are usually great and chances are you can afford to give away something small for free.

Getting NEW Customers

• The shared restroom - Are you in a building where you share a restroom with other businesses? Why not put a coupon or a sign there so visitors know you're there and could potentially kill "two birds" with one stone next time.

• Customer trade - Do you do hair or nails for someone who works at a local magazine, newspaper or other advertising venue? Give them free treatments in exchange for advertising.

• Friend get a friend - Offer a free color, cut or manicure when you bring a friend OR bring a friend and the friend gets it free.

• Punch cards - Give your customers a card and each time they get a treatment they get a punch in their card. On the 10th punch they get a free treatment. One last idea, keep their cards for them so that they don't have to remember to bring them.

• Birthday promotions - Free treatment on your customer's birthday. Email them on their birthday week.

Need More Stylists?

• See some fabulous hair on the street? Ask them who styled it, call them and invite them in!

Get Your Information Digital Now!

• Take all of your cards you have customer information written down on and put them into an information manager. Quickbooks and Filemaker are very easy to use and affordable!

Do you own or work at a salon? Are you doing some creative things with marketing AND email marketing? Chime in with some more ideas!

4 Easy Steps to Using Personalization for Appointment Reminders

Many of you run businesses that mainly operate offline where your customers make appointments or reservations.  Do you find yourself getting stuck in the rut of having to make countless phone calls to confirm or remind people of them? This time consuming tasks can also cost you money.  VerticalResponse can help out. Why not try doing ONE weekly email marketing campaign using personalized reminders based on the specific date and time of the appointment because ONE email definitely sounds better than 50 phone calls. How do you do it? It's a lot simpler than you think.

1. At the beginning of each week have all of the appointments in one spreadsheet. You'll want email address, first name, date of appointment or reservation and the specific time, each in their own fields.

2. When you upload your list, simply select the corresponding field name for email address and first name, then choose either the field names provided or choose "custom field" like I've done below for TIME and DATE. Just remember which ones you used you'll need that information in the next step.

3. When you create your email marketing campaign you'll include these field names with curly brackets in your content. For instance:

Dear {FIRST_NAME},

We're sending you this email today to remind you of your upcoming appointment
Your appointment is scheduled for:

Date: {DATE}
Time: {TIME}

See you there!
Sincerely,
The Team at Company ABC

4. All of the dates and times that correspond to each email address when you upload your list will then automatically populate those brackets into your campaign. Voila!

And don't forget, if an email bounces back, you might want to call up your recipient to get their updated email address. Then you can remind them of their upcoming appointment while you have them on the phone.

Got any new ideas of how to use personalization? Let's hear them!