Don't already use email marketing to promote your the men's grooming products you offer your customers?
Then you owe it to yourself to keep reading (you'll thank us later).
Imagine this scenario: as a wholesaler of men's grooming products, our sales team spends many hours a day giving our clients the best insights they have to improve their marketing efforts.
In all those hours of conversation, there's one holy element of marketing that we simply cannot believe is so chronically ignored by retailers across several different types of stores: email marketing.
The excuses are varied indeed:
"I thought email marketing was dead."
"Facebook is enough for us."
"I didn't think email marketing actually works."
"I wouldn't even know where to start."
So lets' tackle these one by one:
Email Marketing Is Dead
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
- Mark Twain
According to MailChimp's email response data, ecommerce sites have a close to 17% open rate and 2.48% CTR (click-through rate: number of email recipients who click the offer links in your emails.
Regular brick-and-mortar stores enjoy a 21.44% open rate with a 2.65% CTR.
If you have retail store with 2500 emails on your list, that means about 537 will open your email. About 66 will click your offer link and, with a 10% conversion rate 6 or 7 will buy.
Might not sound like much...until you stack the numbers up on a daily basis. If those average sales add up to $30 to $60 you could be looking at adding an extra $400 a day from a list of 2500.
Think about what happens as you continue to grow your mailing list. If you double that list to 5000 subscribers, you could be adding thousands of extra dollars a month...without spending a dime in advertising.
"Facebook is enough for us"
Some of our retailers insist on posting and posting and posting some more to Facebook.
This is time consuming and worst yet, not very measurable. You can't tell if this time is truly well spent.
Other retailers insist on continuously pouring money into Facebook Ads, which isn't a bad thing...except that they're positioning themselves to constantly have to pour more money into getting more clients.
In both scenarios, these retailers are allowing Facebook to retain ownership of their marketplace.
Put it to you another way: if for any reason Facebook canceled either your account (this has been known to happen quite often), you'd be out of a customer base and market connection.
With email marketing, YOU are the one who owns the contact information of your customer and the decision-making power of when to email them.
Best of all, once that email address is yours, you don't have to pay for it again.
"I didn't think email marketing actually works."
One of our local clients, who specializes in a curated retail experience for men's grooming products didn't buy any ads for this year's Black Friday campaign.
They relied exclusively on their email list to promote their Black Friday specials.
They sent out only three emails.
How did they do?
How about this - they cleared so much damn stock on Black Friday, they needed to come to our warehouse on Saturday for emergency replenishment so they could be able to fulfill Cyber Monday's orders.
"I wouldn't even know where to start."
Our recommendation - if you've read up to this point, you're pretty clearly just starting out when it comes to email marketing.
There are a few options that a beginner-friendly and are very basic, allowing you to get a running start with little experimentation time.
These companies include:
These three services are by no means the best of the best, but if you're just starting out, they're perfect. Once you do graduate from email marketing Padawan to full-out Jedi, we'll guide you through the more advanced systems that will continue to help you grow your store.
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Want to see some stellar email marketing in action? If you're not already a Perma Brands customer, either request our catalog or register to become one of our trusted retailers.
Already one of our clients? You're going to love this...
...if you place an order with a minimum value of $1200 by December 9th, 2016, you'll get a free consultation with our ecommerce manager, who will help with the following:
Set up the email marketing system of your choice
Write your first email
Work with you on developing a personalized email marketing plan
Answer any questions you might have
You can claim this by entering the code EMAILMARKETING at the checkout when placing your order.