Earlier this year, Death Wish Coffee Director of Ecommerce joined me for a few episodes of Pitstop. One thing we talked about was how they run their email list of over 70,000 subscribers!
Generating an active and dynamic business ecosystem that engages the customer as a community member, not just a source of sale.
- Use randomized leech-in options, like gift codes of varying amounts, to continue to drive incentivization and interactions with the brand.
- Stick to more tangible offered benefits, such as gift codes, that customerscan understand. A percentage off a purchase can be vague and distancing for the consumer, but a flat rate, such as $5 off, is more likely to drive engagement and purchases as it’s something more concrete and relatable.
- 10 or 10,000 visits or engagements a dayYou should be doing everything you can to encourage your customers to entrust you with their email or contact information, putting you in control of future engagements with those consumers. Anything you can do to capture first party data will generate future leads.
- Remain engaged and active with your leads throughout your business relationship, not just sporadically. Make contact as often as possible, in the form of product and brand updates, gifts codes and special offers, feedback requests and direct emails upon new purchases, to continue their engagement with your brand even after their transaction has been completed.
- Email is your primary and fundamental point of contact, but always drive further engagement from your lists to your other available content-options. such as SMS updates or offers using a tool like Omnisend or Privy.
- Reward those engagements. Provide unique offers through your various engagement mediums, not just the same offers repeated. Push them up your value ladder, from would be one time buyer to dedicated subscriber, one step at a time.
- Become familiar with the average timeline of product turnover for customers. If it takes a week to finish a bag of coffee, then a week after your system registers a purchase, reach out to that customer with an offer for their next purchase. This drives a sense of community and creates a special bond between the brand and the consumer.
Why continue to use email as a primary contact when we live in a world of social media and text messaging?
- Email remains the most cost effective and direct means for reaching out to your customers, while driving active engagements from the consumer back to your product.
- Automated email systems are by far the cheapest option for mass-contact, and can be randomized to avoid stale or repeating content.
- Customers can easily engage with your brand in return, providing valuable active and up to date feedback on your products, again with no extra cost beyond the initial price of the email campaign.
- Unlike SMS which can only appear as text or static images, or social media which requires the consumer to come to your brand constantly for updates, emails also allow for flyer-style marketing, turning your outreach into a storefront from which they can directly purchase product.
Mentioned in this episode:
Triple Whale - Whale Mail
