Lesson Three: Things
Get Sophisticated
In the last ten years, e-mail as a marketing and promotion tool has matured substantially. Many dive stores now send out electronic newsletters in lieu of printed ones. E-mail is also well suited for last-minute promotions. Case in point:
Recently, I got a message from one of the owners of a dive store I once managed in the Chicago suburbs. She told me that a couple who ran a dive operation in the eastern Caribbean was going to be in town in two weeks, and had offered to do a one-evening slide show and seminar. The problem was how to promote it on short notice.
We put together a special e-mail, using one of Constant Contact’s “Invitation” templates. Unlike the newsletter template the store normally uses, this one is short and to the point. It’s also effective. Despite the short notice, the store filled the seminar with over two dozen people.
E-mail is by far the most cost effective advertising and promotion tools dive stores have at their disposal (which is why you read about it so much in this column). It does, however, have several limitations:
- It won’t reach everyone on your mailing list: Dive stores typically have valid e-mail addresses on only 25 to 30 percent of their customer base. Keeping that list up to date is a lot of work.
- Not everyone who gets your e-mail will read it: The best you can hope for is that 35 to 40 percent of those who receive your e-mail will open and read it. Fewer still will click through on links to your website. (It should be noted, however, that this may be a better response rate than your direct mail receives.)
The chief benefits of e-mail are that it’s fast and cheap — and that, even though you may only have e-mail addresses for a small percentage of your customers, they may still be the ones who account for most of your business.
E-mail is no panacea, though. Shortly after the store in Chicago sent out its seminar invitation, another store I know in the mid-Atlantic region decided to use e-mail to promote a last-minute trip to south Florida. The format they used was similar to the one used by the store in Chicago. It was opened and read by a similar number of people. And, last I checked, it didn’t result in a single person signing up for the trip.
The fact is, neither e-mail nor any other form of advertising and promotion can work miracles.
While you might be able to use this sort of “just in time” advertising to fill the last one or two spaces in a trip, there is simply no way you can fill up an entire five-day trip with less than a month’s notice.
No substitute for personal contact »
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