Tips for improving your sales

Article from July, 30th, 2003.

Ok, if you already use bulk email marketing, you want to know how to increase your sales. Because, hopefully, you already have some, otherwise, you would be out of business. The best way to increase your sales is to experiment. Bulk email marketing campaign consists of several components - e-mail format, the message itself and the recipients. Here is what tweaking with the format of your e-mail can do:

A company called RedV Network sent out three e-mails, all identical except for the picture. One displayed a picture of a man, another showed a picture of a woman, and the third one resembled earlier mailings and did not contain a picture. Their audience was mostly the young males. Here are the results they got:

Woman: 1,332 clicks, 25 sales, $541.20 total sales revenue
No picture: 1,229 clicks, 32 sales, $674.35 total sales revenue
Man: 1,288 clicks, 33 sales, $727.95 total sales revenue

If you look at the results you can come to the conclusion that the woman picture prompted more people to click, but it was the man's picture that prompted them to buy. You might want to experiment with the images in your e-mails, too.

Then the message itself - you can you change it to make more sales? Simple. Just prompt people to buy. How? Introduce a discount timetable. For example, offer your customers a discount based on when they make the purchase. Most people make a purchasing decision within 24 hours. So, offer a large discount to people who buy within 24 hours from opening your e-mail (you'll need a special software to track that). Offer a smaller discount
for people who buy within a week after receiving your message. Even if you don't have a way to track time, offer such discounts - the sales usually go up 5-15%.

Finally, tweaking with your mailing list. This popular technique is called segmenting and it does not matter if your e-mails are self collected or bought. First, you have a single mailing list, let's say it's 1000 recipients. Assume you've been sending out weekly newsletters for about three months and have 100 leads with 20 sales. Split your list to divide those who responded to your offers and those who did not. Now you have two lists - 900 "no action" recipients and 100 recipients who responded (including 20 that bought your product), i.e. two lists - 900 e-mails and 100. Now you need to alter the message you send to the recipients from the second list. They already responded, you just need to convince them to make a purchase. As your sales grow, you can split your second list one more time, to include only the people who make a purchase. You don't need to explain them your product (they already bought it) - simply inform them.

The other way to segment your e-mail audience is by total amount spent, season of purchase (for seasonal products), type of product bought, etc.

Relevant links:

    • Notes about e-mail message types and formats
    • Where to buy or rent mailing lists?
    • About bulk email marketing

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