Email offers are nothing new. You might be doing them already or have dabbled in the past. Quite often when speaking to new studios that have joined Fotomerchant, we hear about challenges with running email campaigns and more often than not, they are treated as one-offs when time or resources permit. And we get it. Your focus is often on the next shoot or dealing with existing orders not leaving you a lot of time to think about creating new offers to past customers. And this is where a huge opportunity lies for your studio. Let’s take a look at the What, Why and How of email campaigns.
Step 1
Firstly, why send offers? Done correctly, offers provide an opportunity for you to stay in front of your customers and provide purchase choices that they might not have been thinking about. Maybe that Mother’s Day picture of the grandkids is a great gift idea. Or perhaps they do, in fact, need that extra group class photo which they didn’t choose to take up the first time around. Your customers change their minds and are often searching for additional prints months later and need a friendly reminder that they are available to buy. That could be all the incentive required to make that purchase and generate new sales for your studio.
Now let’s stop and think about all the special events that might interest your customers. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Memorial Day, the list goes on. There are countless opportunities throughout the year that you could be providing an offer to your customers to help increase sales for your studio.
Step 2
The next step is figuring out what to send to them? And herein lies one of the biggest steps often overlooked in a lot of customer marketing. What do my customers want? What kind of offer are they interested in? Do they want 10% off, or are they more interested in free shipping? It’s something we take really seriously at Fotomerchant as knowing (and using) this information can take your studio from good to better.
So how do we figure out the what? Data = Insights. You need to start looking at your email campaigns as data collection efforts. Tracking every email sent and measuring as much data as possible can be collated to highlight insights. Which customers opened? What offer worked better than another? Is this different from county to county? Countless data points can be captured to help inform your marketing efforts resulting in better campaigns and increased conversions. It sounds like an overwhelming process, and many of you reading are probably saying, “but I don’t have the resources to do that,” which is where we got to the how.
Step 3
The simple answer: start testing. Take a step. You’re not going to be able to capture 6,000 data points for every email sent and you don’t need to. We just recommend you start testing. Even a simple test like knowing that your first design offering 10% performed better than another design with the same offer is a step in the right direction. Knowing that your Mother’s Day campaigns are by far outselling your Father’s Day campaigns is an insight. It helps inform. It gives you something to think about for the next campaign or offer you run. Using these insights, you can increase the likelihood of your customers making that next purchase. It’s called selling better.
At Fotomerchant, we’re firm believers in the power of customer data and how it can transform a studio. We provide our studios with the ability to run effective email campaigns to their customers without having to do it themselves. We set up, design and run email campaigns that collect the aggregate data across all our campaigns for every studio. It’s all a part of Fotomerchant. So instead of simply looking at how a single campaign has performed for a single studio, we can see which campaigns are performing across ALL of our studios. We can see what offer is working more than another and use this to convert more sales. It’s how we provide a competitive advantage to studios to sell better & faster and it’s how we deliver better & faster results for our customers.
If that sounds good to you and you want to learn about how we can help your studio do things better & faster, get in touch for a live demo.
