Tag Archives: email advertising

Email Marketing, Online Marketing

Sam’s Club Canada Experiences The Success of Good Email Marketing

1 Comment

Sam’s Club Canada experienced the full power of email marketing last week when they ran a special “open house” email promotion.

On November 12, 2008 they sent out this email flyer with the subject “Welcome to our Open House”:

Sams Club eFlyer November 2008

As you can see, the email is very well formatted with a big call to action at the top and two specific product focuses. One of the biggest mistakes people make when creating email marketing campaigns is that they cram in as many products as possible, which ultimately just dilutes the amount of attention each item can get.

This email proved to be incredibly effective because the day the sale started (Friday) people were lined up at 3:00am at some stores (Note: The stores only open at 7:00am). The television sold out of their Vaughan location in a matter of minutes. This obviously left a bunch of angry consumers, but that’s an issue to discuss a different day.

This just goes to show you that sending out an email with a lucrative offer can have consumers jumping off the couch and racing to your store…even at an ungodly hour of the morning!

Business Blunders, Email Marketing, Online Marketing

Future Shop’s Email Marketing Blunder

2 Comments

Last week Future Shop, one of Canada’s biggest electronics retailers, launched a large in-house email promotion and made just about the biggest blunder you could make. Despite the fact that Future Shop made a huge rookie mistake (one of the things we coach all our email marketing clients about), I must give them kudos on a very interesting concept.

The promotion was “Future Shop 10 Days of Amazing Deals”. The idea is that the customer (in this case me) is supposed to check the same email every day and it will automatically update to show the new deals of the day. I’ll be the first to admit this does sound cool and is an interesting promotional idea. From a technical standpoint it’s actually pretty basic since they just change the image on their server that is being downloaded, but to the average end-user it’s entirely ‘different’ and ‘neat’. I suspect the marketing staff at Future Shop are relying on people flagging the message in their inbox and coming back to it. I sort of question whether that is a good strategy, but that is a question for another day.

The big blunder, that in my opinion ruined an otherwise cool idea, was the fact that when the email first landed in my inbox on “Deal Day 1”, none of the links worked. No matter what link I clicked on in the email, it only led me to a ‘page not found’ error. How on earth do you launch a campaign like this with that kind of problem? I mean, this not only looks so bad to each and every recipient (and I’ve got to imagine that’s a ton!), but it must kill their conversion ratio.

I can only imagine the look on the marketing manager’s face when he got the slick new promotional email in his inbox and found out it didn’t actually connect to the Future Shop website.

[I should mention that I had several people check the links from various locations to make sure it wasn’t just me that got unlucky with broken links.]

Like we always tell our customers, if the goal of your email is to drive traffic to your website, then a good rule of thumb is to make sure the link you’re putting in front of people actually works.

Future Shop: 10 Days of Amazing Deals

For every “deal day” since day 1, Future Shop did get things sorted out and the links have been working. But, the fact that on day 1 the link reading “If you are having problems viewing this email, please try the web edition” didn’t work…well, that’s a big time blunder.

Email Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Marketing

Back To School Emails in Full Swing

Leave a comment

Where did the summer go? I could have sworn it was just June and now all of a sudden its mid-August.

And, we all know the dreaded season that creeps up on us in August… the back to school season!

Starting last week ‘back to school’ themed emails were flying. The first wave started almost two weeks ago as many retailers were eager to start spreading the news about their back-to-school savings, but last week the number spiked dramatically.

Everyone gets on the back-to-school bandwagon trying to vie for those lucrative dollars (especially in a struggling economy). The most dominant business type that send out back-to-school related emails are clothing stores. From casual to upscale to school uniforms, these retailers were pumping out emails to their targeted audience as fast as possible. Many retailers adopted a ‘daily back-to-school email special’ that they would send out each and every day in order to entice customers to make a purchase.

Email marketing is proving to be very effective for these retailers since their target market is actively engaged on the Internet and checks their email regularly. Also, since retailers are generally contacting ‘past customers’, they already have a bond or relationship with that customer, which helps further drive future repeat purchases.

This year many of the email marketing campaigns are tied to social marketing components with outlets having a MySpace or Facebook page that they are urging people to become ‘friends’ with. This twp prong approach is gaining in popularity since sites like Facebook and MySpace have exploded in popularity.