Creative email marketing content can be mined from hobbies and holidays.

Last year on Cinco de Mayo I published my secret recipe for frozen margaritas. This year I decided to go more historical with a great Swiftpage E-Marketing case study.

Every Cinco de Mayo, history buff, Sage ACT! Software User and Texan Les McGee gets one more holiday to showcase his email marketing creativity. Les sells 100% made-in-the-USA United States and State Flags and flagpoles for Betsy Ross Flag Girls Company Inc.

Les combines his hobby of researching history with his business need for lead generation. Before e-marketing, Les’ prospecting strategy was territory “drive by’s,” looking for flags and flagpoles on commercial properties like apartment buildings, schools and big companies. Whenever he’d find one he didn’t know about, he added the information to his Sage ACT! database.

“I’m very database oriented,” Les says. “It’s the only way I keep up with my market. The property management business is very transient. One of my buildings has had 4 managers in 8 years. Big properties may have 10-12 flagpoles. So if I don’t keep up, I miss sales.”

About a year ago, Les discovered email marketing and enrolled in The Database Diva’s Drip Marketing Camp. “I’m a huge fan of the internet, and I love email marketing. But I hate when I subscribe to things online and they try to sell me new products without giving me the info I thought I was getting. I didn’t want to do my marketing that way.”

That’s how the marriage of history and marketing was inspired. Les doesn’t try to sell flags in his email marketing messages. “My philosophy is ‘I want to share something pithy and short about our US history and remind you that we’re a local resource.’”

Email Marketing Content Inspiration

At first he thought he’d send messages quarterly, but once a month is proving to better timing, even though Les acknowledges it’s often hard to come up with a different concept each month. Some of his historical flag topics have included:

• The story of the first United States flag
• The 48-star flag (the one Les grew up with)
• Flags in the Revolutionary War

“I read books on flags, so I write about any flag having to do with the history of the US,” he says. “We share the border with Mexico and I like to celebrate their hard-working culture and religion on Cinco de Mayo.” Later this month, Les will send a reminder to his list to lower all flags to half-staff for Memorial Day.

Besides his flag books, Les relies on Wikipedia and Google Images. He finds he’s more inspired to do his writing at the end of the month because “it has to get done–I feel the pressure!”

Swiftpage Email Marketing Results

What’s the payoff for all this hard work, we asked Les? Here are some of his tangible results:

1. A pre-school in his territory reads the history lessons to its children.
2. A local radio station reads his messages on the air (he’s working on converting them to customers).
3. A principal at a local school caught a “wrong date in history” and pointed it out to Les to correct (school’s never out for lifelong learners).

That’s just the fun part. The business part is even better. “For the first 4-5 months, I didn’t get much response,” Les says. “Recently, I had 15 people email me back with orders. People are always on their computers, so they’ll receive one of my messages, open it, call me and say, ‘Les, I need some flags.’ On sales calls, many times people think they’ve done business with me–even when they haven’t!”

Les sends about 1,400 messages per month and averages about a 15% open rate. His favorite time to send his emarketing campaign is the first or second day of the month at about 10am because “the apartment complexes don’t open till 9am.”

After 8 years of “drive by” prospecting, Les says he doesn’t get in the field as often as he used to. But he writes twice as many orders as the other reps at his company, even though his territory is not in the most affluent area. “I’ll take quality when I can get it, and quantity when I can’t,” he says.

Les says there are 4 secrets to his email marketing success.

1. Prepare your database so you can do something with it. This takes time. “I had to go back and code everybody on my list with P1 for flagpoles, P2 for Flags and P3 for both, then code all my prospects and customers,” he said. “But I look forward to doing postcard mailings and email blasts, so I had to have an accurate list.”
2. Always be prospecting. “When you start out in sales, you are prospecting more than writing orders. The longer you stay with it, the more writing of orders you’ll do and the less prospecting. But you still have to keep up with everyone. Even now I still find flagpoles off the beaten path, even though I think I know anybody who’s got one. Some customers buy at the corporate level and some buy local, but they all go on my list.”
3. Be persistent in acquiring email addresses. It increases your marketing options. “In the old days, tracking business on 3×5 cards was cutting edge. Not anymore.
4. Be consistent. Schedule messages and get them out on time. “Despite not being in the field as much, people still instantly recognize the Betsy Ross brand.”

And how much did Drip Marketing Camp help Les organize his database and launch his emarketing campaign strategy? “Lori, you’re better than I thought you were, and I thought you were fabulous.”

The right email marketing software helps The Missourian Publishing Company meet its monthly email newsletter deadlines.

How long does it take to publish a monthly company email newsletter? 10 hours? A hundred hours?

Well, if it really takes that long, it’s no wonder more companies have good intentions, but don’t actually do them.

With the right email marketing software and a simple newsletter template, an email newsletter should take only an hour or two each month to research, compose, post and send. Here’s how Stephen Trentmann, sales manager of the commercial print division of The Missourian Publishing Company, gained momentum with his email newsletter marketing.

The Missourian Publishing Company is a family-owned and -operated newspaper and publishing company. It has two production facilities in Washington, MO, and satellite offices in Union and St. Clair, MO. The Missourian is also a full-service graphics communication company that provides a wide range of creative printing solutions for our business and publishing clients.

Stephen’s goal was to start leveraging the nearly 3,000 contacts in his ACT! Software, which he had been building for more than two years. “I needed to create marketing campaigns that consistently reached out to our customers and did not take 100 hours per month to do so,” Stephen says.

Stephen followed The Database Diva’s email newsletter template suggestion, which included 3-4 recurring topics, each with the goal of educating, entertaining and compelling his contacts to use The Missourian as its communications resource. “Lori showed me the logical steps to create a professional looking email newsletter and good techniques for gathering story ideas that could be used when it was time to assemble the next scheduled newsletter.”

Stephen distributes his newsletter using the email marketing software Swiftpage, which works with his ACT! Software. The integration allows him to update his email newsletter template and then send it to current contacts right out of his database. “The result has been just what I wanted. Our customers remember we are here when they receive the newsletter, and it sparks ideas to help them with their business. And the time it takes to publish the newsletter has been reduced to under a manageable few hours.

After successfully  meeting his monthly newsletter deadlines for more than a year, Stephen’s goal is to utilize ACT!’s dynamic groups better and send more focused email campaigns to specific markets.

But he believes his real success comes from using his ACT! database everyday to follow up consistently. “I would not be able to be able to keep in contact and document activity without ACT!,” he says. “In the first 3 months of 2010 I documented communication with 729 different people in our database.

“I was surprised at the amount of reporting Swiftpage feeds back after a campaign is sent. There’s a lot of info in the call lists and other email reports.”

Loan Originator Patrick Loo is on his way to mastering list segmentation to drive his email marketing campaigns.

Patrick Loo had an unusual marketing challenge: He wanted to shrink his list. Most marketers struggle with the opposite challenge. They want to build their list. The bigger the better. 

But as a loan originator for 20 years and a former manager of a large mortgage office, Patrick’s database had grown in size to 9,500 contacts. Today he’s one of the top 8 of 50 loan originators at Mortgage Capital, a Beverly Hills, CA, lender, and personal service is his number-one core business value. 

Patrick knew his list was too large for his marketing to be as personal, and, therefore as effective, as he wanted it to be. So he made a commitment to an aggressive, 9-month marketing plan to find his top 2,000 prospects. “Originally I contacted ‘The Database Diva’ to automate my sales and lower my cost for marketing,” he said. But he had a lot of database work to do first. 

“Lori Feldman helped me really organize my contacts. She gave me ACT! training to target specific demographics in my database, such as people with certain loan amounts and those with active emails,” Patrick said. “At least 70% of my training involved learning how to use ACT! software–and I’ve used ACT! for more than 15 years and considered myself proficient. Lori moved me from being proficient to being a pro!” 

As a busy mortgage professional, Patrick didn’t have time to fine-tune his database. He needed to be on the phone talking to home buyers and real estate agents. But he dedicated himself to the process because he wanted to reach out to each contact as if in a one-to-one conversation–in every message. 

Value Each Person on Your Email Marketing List

“I hate receiving email that’s impersonal. What’s the point of sending out a lot of email to my marketing list if it’s not useful, looks like everyone else’s or goes straight to the spam folder?” he said. “I want to be very personal, specific and most important, capable of responding quickly. You can never automate everything, and you must always lead with the personal touch.” 

His comprehensive marketing system included a website redesign, direct mail postcards, with emails and drip marketing using ACT! e-Marketing powered by Swiftpage. 

“Initially I had to increase my mailers from 700 to 2,000 in order to clean up my list. Now I’m trying to reduce the number of mailers to around 1,000,” Patrick said. “I would ultimately like to rely more on email marketing. However, I think I’ll always have a need for sending postcards to my clients.” 

The most critical component of his marketing plan became his database segmentation of active clients and prospects. Once this was done, Patrick could survey his customers to confirm their loan balances and mortgage rates. 

Best Customer Service with Email Marketing

With that information verified, Patrick could send individualized savings options to homeowners each time rates changed. One campaign netted him 9 extra closings in one month. 

Patrick’s future e-marketing goals include developing more follow-up drip marketing campaigns and creating more surveys to capture homeowners’ borrowing intentions that can be automatically populated into ACT! 

He offers these 3 insightful tips to anyone starting out with drip marketing: 

1. Personalize your email marketing
2. Respond quickly to email responders, and
3. Find a balance between keeping in contact and not overloading your list with what recipients may consider spam.

Candy Torahs credits its successful email marketing campaigns for its structured follow-up system

 CandyTorahs.com manufactures personalized, Jewish-themed party favors and place cards for special occasions. Unlike most of its competitors, the company specializes in serving a niche of Bar Mitzvah moms, planners, Synagogues, Jewish agencies, clergy and schools. 

It’s a “one-man” show, says owner Harry Liebman, who develops the products, builds the website, designs the promotional materials, manages the customer database and drip marketing campaigns, takes the orders and customizes the designs. “My family helps me make and ship orders,” he says. 

A few years ago, Harry had a big problem: Tracking and following up on sales leads. The typical lead time for his products is 3 to 24 months. But when a mom would contact Harry a year or more before her family’s event, he would lose sight of her after a few months.  Sometimes, he says, so much time would pass without communication that he’d feel too uncomfortable to contact her again. After all, there’s nothing worse than saying to a once-hot prospect, “Um..you might not remember me, but about a year ago you contacted CandyTorahs.com about party favors,” says Harry. “Ugh!” 

After talking to The Database Diva, Harry realized drip marketing was his answer. “In fact, I knew it the first time I heard the term ‘drip marketing,’” he says. “I could see the value of creating a well-thought-out email marketing campaign, planned in advance and delivered over time, targeting different types of prospects. It seemed to be the best way to stay in touch, offer prospects useful information, and deliver persuasive information as the event approached.” 

But now Harry had a new problem: He couldn’t figure out how to launch his drip marketing campaign. “When I tried to start, I ended up going in lots of different directions, starting over, and getting discouraged. I needed a roadmap, a guide.” 

Enter The Database Diva and her DripMarketingCamp, which gave Harry exactly what he needed: a drip marketing blueprint that helped him plan a complete communication campaign. He also learned how to find his own authentic writing voice. 

“I began to understand how to see my messages from the mom’s point of view. I learned how to be someone she liked–a giver of useful info and resources about planning big special parties–and not someone she scorned–a spewer of product data about CandyTorahs.com sizes, prices, colors, choices, blah, blah, blah. The Database Diva gave me confidence. Most important, committing to the DripMarketingCamp process forced me to allocate the necessary time to finish and launch my campaign.” 

Email Campaign Design

One of the biggest benefits of creating email marketing campaigns is tracking the results. Harry says his results have been “good to excellent,” and he generously shares his top three benefits here. 

1. Staying in touch. “Right now, I have about 50 people in my database who are having events within the next 3 months. Each of them has heard from me on a monthly basis for a while, and more often as the date draws near. My niche is very small. It’s critical that I keep a tight focus on every lead I get. Swiftpage has made that automatic. This is excellent.” 

2. Engaging with prospects. “My open rates are astonishing. One of my mailings TO PROSPECTS went to 80 people. 36 people opened it (a 45% open rate). Each person opens my emails an average of 3.5 times! They click on my links an average of 59 times!” 

3. Retaining customers’ interest. One mailing Harry sends goes out after the customer’s party. It gets an open rate of 72% and a click rate of 7.5%. The message includes just one link inviting them to CandyTorah.com‘s Facebook fan page. “Here’s one of my secrets,” Harry says. “Fully leverage ACT e-Marketing’s mail-merge personalization features.” Below is the letter Harry sends. He thinks at least half of all recipients reply personally to this message. “That’s relationship building!” he says. 

Hi [[First Name]],
How was [[Child Name]]’s Bar Mitzvah weekend? Are you still on cloud nine? How about [[Child Name]]? After you decompress, you might check-out the CandyTorah’s Facebook page. You can post photos (I’d love to see them), review our products (please), share advice with other parents and so on.
Congratulations on this milestone. And be sure to enjoy these upcoming years – they go by so fast. This year my eldest, Elliot, started college!
Harry 

Like many other businesses, Harry believes his business has been off this year, but he understands what he must do next. “I’ve neglected my pipeline (no post card mailings, for example) and that’s a factor. And although I engage my prospects, I must refocus on closing sales. I believe the drip marketing sets up the sale. I need to figure out the best way to close more. 

“My customers love me, but currently I don’t have anything else to sell them. Once the party’s over, it’s over. I’m thinking about products for their kids as they start driving, graduating, etc. These are some of my next steps.” 

Email Campaign Tips

Before he leaves us for Candyland, Harry has these 3 drip marketing tips to share so you can create your own successful email marketing campaigns. 

Tip 1: Don’t delay. Set-up a drip campaign now. The sooner you start, the sooner you can develop it and focus it on your goals. It takes time and you will get better at it. So start now. 

Tip 2: Don’t be stuffy. Talk to your prospects like they’re your friends.  For example, 

BAD: If we can be of assistance as you consider your party favor needs, please give us a call.
BETTER: Your party’s coming up fast. Please let me know if I can help. 

BAD: Thank you for entering our monthly drawing. We will notify you early next month with the results.
BETTER: Thanks for entering our drawing. There are 22 entries so far – hopefully I’ll have good news for you after the 1st. 

Tip 3: Look at your own email inbox. Which regular mailings do you look forward to receiving? Which emails do you always read? “Why? I know why! Because they’re useful, valuable, entertaining, forward-able. Make your own mailings that way, too!”

Drip marketing is not something I just talk about, it’s the primary marketing strategy I’ve integrated into my business for the past 6 years. (I’ve actually relied on drip marketing for more than 20 years, but it’s only been recently that drip marketing automation software has scaled to desktop use for SMBs, small sales teams and consultants. Cost is no longer a barrier to entry; for under a few hundred dollars a month, any size company can compete digitally for more business with drip marketing automation.)

I’d like to share one of my personal drip marketing success stories with you. It’s a great example of why it’s so important to implement a drip marketing strategy sooner rather than later. 

About a year ago, The Database Diva received a referral for a new prospect who wanted to set up a customer database. Golda Cohen, our marketing manager, talked with the company owner initially, and then sent him a proposal for our services.

Then we put him on a “Proposal Follow-Up” Drip Marketing Campaign

Golda continued to follow up on the sale at intervals he requested. But the drip campaign was running in the background, too, continuing to educate him about all of our other services that he had not yet asked about. Additionally, now that he was a high-priority prospect, he was also receiving e-mails inviting him to our live events.

I don’t remember that this sale took longer or shorter to close than normal, but we did finally get the order. Golda then scheduled an installation date for our Senior Consultant and a different day for database marketing training with me.

Our client’s database was installed without a hitch (we love when this happens), and now it was time for training. Several months had passed since our client first entered our sales pipeline, and throughout his journey with us, all the way up to his day of training, I never once had a conversation with him.

On the day of training, I showed up at our new customer’s office and waited for him while he finished a phone call. Then he appeared and exclaimed to me…

(The Big Reveal)

“Lori–are you ‘“THE Database Diva?’
“I’ve been reading your stuff, and
I was “really looking forward to meeting you!”

Frankly, he caught me completely off guard! I was looking forward to meeting him, too, of course. But he was really looking forward to meeting me! In fact, he already felt like we knew each other, even though we’d never said even as much as a “hello” to each other.

That’s because for months, he had been absorbing everything we sent him about our sales process, our implementation team, our quick-start tips and our case studies. He was now an informed customer who was eager to taste his own success. So we got down to business and had a great training day.

The proposal follow-up drip marketing campaign is one of 7 Must-Have Drip Marketing Campaigns I believe every sales organization needs to differentiate itself from the competition. More important, these drip campaigns reduce the risk factor all prospects inherently feel while going through their buying process. The customer knows he must make a decision to buy or not to buy. But that doesn’t mean he enjoys the decision making process. If anything, he’s looking for reasons to eliminate you from his short list to make his selection that much easier.

As I reflected on it later that evening, I realized…

Wouldn’t it be great if every new business relationship�
started out just like this one–with a customer who was this thrilled and delighted
to be doing business with us?

Drip Marketing, The Secret Sauce

Having a well thought through proposal follow-up campaign, in this case, was a critical factor in closing this sale and giving our customer an overwhelming number of reasons to validate his wise decision to select us as his vendor.

Yes, it took me several hours to think through the sequence of messages I wanted to include in my drip marketing campaign. And, yes, then I had to write all the messages.

And I wasn’t satisfied that this was a perfect drip campaign. I wanted to include more information than I had room for. (I only wanted the campaign to last about as long as my typical sales cycle and then end.) But “done is better than perfect.” And my one-time investment of thought and copywriting continues to reap goodwill and smarter clients and prospects as I add them to this same drip campaign.

Drip Marketing’s 85/15 Ratio

A successful drip marketing campaign is 85% strategy and only 15% technology. That’s why they’re so hard to execute. Most companies starting out with drip marketing get this equation all wrong.

One of the biggest mistakes I see marketers make is thinking their marketing automation software gives them license to repeatedly blast the same promotion 24/7. Boring! And ineffective.

Marketers know intuitively this approach won’t work. Yet they don’t know what to do instead. (That’s why I created my 30-day DripMarketingCamp.) They end up missing out on a special opportunity to help prospects fall in love with them via education to make better buying decisions and then kicking off good, solid business releationships with more engaged customers.

Ann Clarke of Gr8IdeasAtWork is a Professional Speaker and veteran ACT! Software User

Ann Clarke cracked the code on maximizing IGAs (Income Generating Activities) when she discovered ACT! Sage Software.

As a long-time professional speaker plus acting chief cook and bottle washer on the business side of www.Gr8IdeasAtWork.com, Ann knew the importance of simplifying her business processes so she could book more speaking gigs and do what she loves most: speaking to and helping women balance successful lives.

So years ago she invested time and resources into learning every feature in her ACT! contact manager that would help her run her business more efficiently. Today she uses the new ACT! Sage 2010 to…

1. Manage her email communication with clients and prospects by attaching incoming and outgoing messages to client records–which eliminated wasted time searching in her inbox
2. Create and track each contract iteration so she always knows which version she sent out last
3. Track all notes and activities with each client for finger-tip access during subsequent conversations
4. Earn thousands of dollars of extra income by mining her database for booking agents near her keynote speaking gigs and offering them one-hour breakfast presentations while she’s “in the neighborhood.”

Because ACT! has been around for more than 20 years, it has a dedicated app developer base that creates special programs to augment ACT!’s contact management features. Ann’s 2 favorite ACT! add-ons are:

• CardScan Executive – which she uses to quickly enter all her business cards the same day she collects them and
• AddressGrabber – which copies electronic contact information from email addresses, websites, and directories, then imports it into her ACT! database for follow up. Both utilities eliminate time-consuming data entry.

Ann says there’s a big difference between professional speakers who use Outlook to manage their contacts and those who’ve discovered ACT! Software. “I’ve eliminated all my file folders!” she says.

Are you a professional speaker who uses ACT! Software? Please share some of your tips with us in the comments below.

More About Ann Clarke…

Ann Clarke’s lifelong vision has been to help women become successful in business. “When women are financially successful, they have better choices.”

Thirty years ago selling houses was one way women could make a lot of money. So in 1978, as a professional writer and photographer, Ann began creating marketing programs for women in real estate. Through “personal promotion marketing” she taught her clients to create bonds with people they had never met. Her reputation grew with her clients’ successes, and she became nationally known as THE expert in “personal promotion marketing.”

It wasn’t long until she was invited to speak at seminars, workshops and conferences across the U.S. and Canada. Her how-to articles appeared frequently in national and regional business publications in print and on the web. Eventually she sold her marketing company to become a full-time speaker. Ann says, “It’s more fun to preach to a crowd than nag one person at a time!”

Ann also draws from her stories in Chicken Soup for the Father & Daughter Soul and Chicken Soup for the Caregiver’s Soul to include tips to help women balance the successful lives she has helped them to create. Quick to recognize that women in business love to learn, Ann created conferences, symposiums and retreats to put other women in the spotlight and showcase their knowledge. She is also the Founder and CEO of Colorado Women of Influence, LLC, a CEO-level mastermind group for highly successful women in business.