Email the editor
| Table of Contents Email the editor |
By: Chuck Pierce
We've all received newsletters or ezines via email. They target specific
audiences, and are produced for a specific purpose. They range from the very
short 'joke of the day' type that is merely a medium for delivery of an
advertisement, to the very long technical discussion of the hydro-dynamics of a
sphere moving through a normal saline solution. They can be used to entertain,
inform, enlist and sell.
As booksellers, we would use the ezine to sell books. Keep that mission in
mind.
You should be convinced (rightfully so) that email advertising is very
profitable. You should know that it has an almost zero outlay in reoccurring
expenses, and returns are high and predictable. Even start-up costs are
relatively low.
If you have a couple thousand addresses of people who have bought books from
you in the past it is time to start using this information to your advantage,
and to the benefit of your customers. This is a highly targeted list, and is
therefore very valuable. Your customers want and need your guidance to keep
them informed as to the goings on in the book community, and provide them with
buying opportunities. It is your duty as a successful bookseller to keep them
away from your competition. Nobody can do a better job of serving your
customers than you so do it.
Where do I get my addresses?
I'll tell you where you DO NOT get them. You don't run to your favorite search
engine and find a website where you can buy a million addresses for $19.95 and
send them your ezine. That is a quick way to get yourself in a LOT of hot
water, and put out of business.
If you have Outlook Express as your mail program, there are a lot of addresses
in your address book right now. Probably 99% of them are past customers. If you
do business with Amazon, there is quite a list of your past customers there
too. Almost our entire address list comes from past customers. Some come from
requests to be added to the ezine list from an opt-in box on the homepage of
our website, and other readers refer some to us.
We were able to accumulate just over 5,000 addresses in the first six months of
saving them, and are currently at just over 11,000 after three years.
Bulk Mail Programs.
For the last three years we have used Desktop Server 2000. It is a very
powerful and easy to use program. We send about 10,000 emails via ISDN (128k)
and it takes about fifteen minutes, and our ISP does not get hit with big
bandwidth usage because the DS2K package acts as a mail server. The ISP doesn't
even know you are sending them. It will maintain both the addresses that you
mail to, and the remove addresses (more about the remove list later).
Besides filtering out the remove addresses, it also filters out specified
domain names, such as .gov or .edu if you wish to avoid mailing to them. It
will even filter out specific words or strings of letters within the address.
We filter words such as info, order, webmaster, adult, nospam, book, read, page
and others.
It costs about $300 and comes with a bunch of other programs and email
addresses that you should THROW AWAY. It can be purchased at:
http://www.desktopserver.com
and is worth every penny. They will pitch other programs that "harvest"email
addresses. Don't buy them, don't use them. If they come packaged with DS2K,
toss them as soon as you get them. They will also give you a free disk with
kabillion "hot, new, fresh addresses" on them it's a coaster. All you want is
the mail management program, Desktop Server 2000.
Remove Requests.
Dealing with remove requests is probably more important than the acquisition of
new addresses. Maintaining and using a remove list is very, very important. As
a merchant, you have every right, both legally and morally, to keep in touch
with your customers. If someone has purchased goods or services from you in the
past you can contact them to 'service their account'.
But if they ask to be left alone - if they specifically request that you stop
contacting them, you MUST. A merchant (or anyone else for that matter) is not
allowed to harass anyone via email. Sending unwanted material to your customers
AFTER being requested to stop is bad business, and may even be illegal. Don't
do it.
Am I Spamming?
If you buy lists from a list service yes you are. If you ignore requests to
be removed from the mail list you are spamming. By doing so you are opening
yourself and your business to all kinds of nasty repercussions. Don't do it.
If you email your customers, you are not spamming. If you make an honest
mistake and mail to someone who is not a customer, you are not spamming. If you
mail from your own email account, with a real email address to reply to, use
and maintain a remove list you are not spamming.
But, sending out several thousand emails comes with a lot of responsibility.
Tolerance for error is right around zero. If you bump into the wrong person
(the rabid anti-spam activist zealot with a cause that really should get a
life) they can bring down a lot of misery on you (we call it 'heat'). They
don't have to prove anything - and you don't even get to defend yourself. With
some ISPs, accusation is the same as conviction, so it may be a good idea to
have your website hosted somewhere other than where your mail is processed.
In three years of mailing our ezine out we have had very few problems because
we religiously maintain and protect and use our remove list. We have had more
problems and complaints from book dealers than from our customers. I suspect
that it is jealousy more than anything else, and a willingness to sling mud
instead of competing fairly. It is interesting to note that book
sellers
don't complain about getting our newsletter. Owners of businesses that actually
sell
books are interested in what their competition is doing, how they are doing
it, why they do it that way and what the result is.
Desktop 2000 has several features where you can filter out certain email
addresses. We set words and phrases in that filter that block out book dealers;
we have a very high percentage of 'anti-spam kooks' in our numbers, and they
are not good customers anyway. As soon as we find out that an address on our
list is that of a book dealer, we put it on the 'remove list'. Book dealers, as
a group, have very narrow margins and they are bound way too tight.
OK. So, you've saved up some addresses, you have acquired and installed and
learned your bulk mail program and it is rolling around to the first of the
month, you are about ready to do your first mailing. It's time to write.
Before you begin banging it out consider these points:
Write the newsletter the way you would write a note to a friend who shares your
interests. Keep the sentences short and simple, keep the paragraphs short and
simple. Interject personal touches; tell something about yourself, something
about your store, the work at the store. Tell amusing anecdotes about
interactions with customers at the store, or the mailman, or even the weather -
whatever.
Share an interesting or funny or informative website address as long as it is
not direct competition to you.
The best commercials make us laugh. The "Happy California Cows" commercial and
the "Counting Sheep" commercials or the "Budweiser Frogs" on TV are excellent
examples of this. Remember WHY people buy books. It is entertainment. The act
of buying books is entertaining. Reading is fun. Be entertaining, have fun with
your ezine and have fun with your customers. They will reward you for it.
Invite them to write back to you with comments or stories of their own. Let
them participate. Sometimes you'll get great material for the next ezine that
way. Tip: If you are going to use a story or information that someone sent you,
ask them if it's ok, and change names.
Your customers want to know what's going on in the book store, they want to
hear about characters you've developed over time (customers, pets, employees,
etc.) They want to hear the next installment of the book store news. As time
goes on they will start to actually look forward to the 'special offer' of the
month. People buy from stores that they feel comfortable in. Familiarity has a
lot to do with comfort levels. The more they hear your store name, the more
they are able to feel a connection to you personally, the more time and money
they will spend in your cyber store. That is one of the reasons that Amazon is
so successful.
The sales pitch should be incorporated into the theme of the newsletter. Ads
should not be clearly marked. They don't need to be precluded with a heading
that says, "This Is An Advertisement", or "A Word From Our Sponsor." Ever
listen to Paul Harvey? Notice the way he makes the advertisements part of his
gig? He is half way into a commercial before you realize that you are even
being pitched. He talks to his audience the way he would talk to a group of
friends that he's having dinner with. He delivers a verbal Ezine. Study his
style, and adapt it to your ezine.
For example: Tell your audience a story about that day you took a day off last
week and an employee bought a whole truck full of books, nice stuff all of it.
Now there's books stacked in the isles, and you've had to explain to the soon
to be ex-employee that she may have to take some of them home with her instead
of a paycheck… "And hey, now that we're all overstocked in merchandise we'll
offer you free shipping if you order five or more books, but you MUST act NOW
because the fire department will be around for their annual inspection soon and
this offer expires next Tuesday…"
When you write a friendly email to your friend, do you fill it up with HTML?
Bouncing frogs, and twirling batons, and exploding fireworks and the sound of a
40-piece brass band? Of course not. And you shouldn't do it in your ezine
either. Keep it simple, low-key and friendly.
Keep it under 1000 words not including the legal stuff at the end (how to be
removed from the list). People just don't have the time or patience to wade
through a small book. And the second mailing of the month (more about that
later) should be VERY short, about 300 words.
I hesitate to even share this idea because it is politically and emotionally
charged, and I'm sure that someone will be offended. But it is important, and
the reader can choose to disregard it if they wish.
Women are treated differently than men. I make no comment as to the
sociological or political aspects of that statement I offer it only as a
statement of fact. Women are treated differently than men. Females have raised
most of us. From the time we are minutes old we learn that the female is the
giver of food and comfort. Later we learn that she is the dispenser of
discipline. She holds both the carrot and the stick. Her power is immense - and
absolute.
It is probably the first thing we learn and we never forget it.
The Israeli Army did a study a few years back about women in the battlefield.
They found that men took orders from a female superior officer better than from
a superior officer who was male, especially while under stress (combat
situations). The order was carried out with fewer reservations, and less
hesitation. Men are accustomed to taking orders from women and not challenging
them. Women are usually neutral. They tend to consider the order, not the
person delivering it.
What does this have to do with our ezine? Odds are that an ezine sent by a
woman will be better received, more widely read, and less likely to draw heat
than one sent by a man. Assuming that half of the receivers are going to be
men, it will make things better by a factor of 50%. More will read it, more
will take the action they've been ordered to take (BUY THE BOOK) and fewer will
complain about receiving spam. We've tested this theory, and it works.
Let's assume that this theory is bunk, it just isn't true. The women's
liberation movement over the last twenty years has been successful in changing
basic animal instinct and everyone is treated equally. What have you lost or
gained by using a woman's name in the ezine? Nothing. If it is true, what have
you gained?
Right in the 'From' line of our ezine we put "Marian @ GentlyUsedBooks.com."
If you are male, and doing an ezine sell some of your ego and sign a female
first name.
Any more than that is just too much. Remember that real clever advertisement
you saw on TV last month yes, the one you laughed at. Now that you've seen it
four dozen times in the last eight weeks is it still funny? Is it becoming
annoying?
Not only do you risk annoying your customers but your customers will begin to
get the idea that if they miss this coupon offer, its ok because there will be
another one next week. It does away with the urgency to act factor which is
very important.
We have found that an expiration date of seven days is just right. Why? Any
shorter and you miss people who are out of the office, away on vacation, etc.
Any longer and your customer will procrastinate and forget. You don't want your
customer to think like this: "This doesn't expire until the end of the month, I
have plenty of time." Create urgency. Tell them in the ad to "act now!"
After a lot of trial and error testing we have found the best pattern is to
send two per month. The first one goes out on the first Tuesday of the month,
with an expiration date of seven days. Why Tuesday? Many people get their email
at work (we can tell by the addresses), and they are not there on weekends,
some aren't there on Monday (physically or mentally). By Tuesday the universe
is back in balance. Our best sales and traffic day, overall, is Thursday. Our
worst is Saturday. The seven-day expiration date allows them one weekend in
case they are shopping from home.
On the following Monday, we send a brief reminder. Just a greeting, and "the
sale is going well, we're getting a great response and take advantage of the
coupon before it expires TOMORROW," and a copy of the offer. That's it. Two or
three hundred words, very short. We also may thank everyone who purchased, and
let them know that they can purchase again. Invariably we'll get at least one
repeat order, and usually they are large orders. In the second mailing, we also
invite our regular customers to share this sale with their friends - and we've
added new customers to our lists that way. The second mailing dollar return is
sometimes larger than the first again because of the urgency factor.
By timing it the way we do, it makes for two mailings, but only one offer. We
are very stingy with the number of "special offers" we make. How can something
truly be special if it happens all the time? One coupon offer per month is all
our customers get. Sometimes we even skip a month (usually when we are real
busy, and don't NEED to discount). We will do the ezine, but make no offer, and
we'll still get orders from it.
Immediately after (I mean within minutes) sending your first mailing you will
get a lot of bounces for bad addresses and a few remove requests. Set your mail
program so that these go to a separate folder. You'll deal with them later
(before your next mailing).
Read ALL remove requests immediately. Sometimes, heat can be avoided by
responding to comments right away. If you get a question like, "How did you get
my address?" respond with a nice note that your email addresses usually come
from previous customers, "but it appears that yours was placed on our list by
error - sorry to have bothered you and we will remove it right away." Even
though they didn't ask to be removed, do it anyway. Even if they email you back
and ask to remain on the list remove them anyway. You have probably just
bumped into a 'spam nazi' or a book dealer, and one address is just not worth
the risk.
Before doing your next mailing, process all the bounced mail and remove
requests. Bounced mail I just take off of the list, I don't add them to the
remove list. Remove requests I take off of the mail list, AND, I add it to the
remove list. Do both.
The first few times you mail you will have a lot of this type of processing to
do, you are establishing a useable list. It does take time, especially in the
beginning. Our remove list contains about 1300 addresses. That is a remove
request rate of about fifteen per mailing, on average. You will get a lot of
remove requests like this: "We are getting your ezine at two addresses, please
remove this one …" or "I'm not supposed to get personal mail at work, please
remove this address and add this one …" Well over 99% of the remove requests
are nicely worded, they just don't want it any more. And that is ok, because
we don't want to send it to anyone who doesn't want to get it.
Overall, we have had very little problems with our ezine. It is fun to produce,
our customers enjoy them and it is very profitable. We keep in personal touch
with many of our customers and there really are a lot of very nice people out
there. People who read are, by and large, a great group.
A newsletter is a very important part of any on-line business marketing plan.
It contributes a lot to the profitability of GentlyUsedBooks.com and properly
executed it will contribute to the overall health of booksellers everywhere. In
an age of corporate type mega-sites, it is imperative that a bookseller
establish a niche and a following of loyal customers. A properly executed ezine
is an excellent way to achieve those ends.
Producing Your Own Newsletter
GentlyUsedBooks.com
| Table of Contents Email the editor |