How to run an email marketing campaign!

[Nienke]

@Mother:
I'm starting an online site where customers can buy vouchers. These vouchers can be spent for booking an accommodation for free for 2 people for 2 nights. The only thing they need to do is have both lunch and dinner at the accommodation. From the accommodations perspective: This means a free room for guaranteed 4 dinners and 4 breakfasts.

The advantage for the accommodations is that since the customers pays us, it’s free for them. Also, this will only be at their low periods. An accommodation has on average an occupancy rate of about 50%, which means that half of the rooms are always empty.
So with us they can choose between an empty room with its costs involved, or a booked room with a profit against it.
This is actually a concept which is huge everywhere in Europe (UK, Germany, Holland, etc.), which we're now introducing here. To clarify: It is not a last minute booking, as there are many. This is accommodations using their knowledge about their occupancy in advance and use this to their benefit.

But to come back to the issue on hand:
Both my company as the concept is new and I am currently busy recruiting accommodations. I'm not yet open for business, because I want to present the customers a good choice, which at this stage I don’t have yet. Therefore I don’t want to go big yet on marketing campaigns etc.
So I need to contact the accommodations, explain my company and my product to them.

And here is the confusion from my side: Cold calling is not advised, sending ‘annoying’ emails is not advised, so I’m in a bit of a jam. How else to inform them about us?

Well, this is as short as I could get it, hopefully some good advice comes my way!

[Blurock]

Nienke, In your case you will have to do cold calling. This can be approached in different ways. Not a shotgun approach, but a well planned and organised strategy.

You wish to recruit suppliers (B&B hotels etc) and customers (the paying public). How do you intend recruiting them? By phoning or calling them one-by one? The purpose of marketing is to communicate and inform. A press release is free and the most under rated form of advertising. This can be arranged with local newspapers, radio stations (do people still listen to the radio?) or in the form of a seminar for owners of B&B's, hotels etc.

Take one area or town at a time and arrange a breakfast or afternoon cocktails etc. Once you have buy-in from suppliers, you can start marketing to consumers. This can once again be in various forms and may include a website, printed ads, mail shots pamphlets and the like.

A good CRM program may give you valuable feedback and allow you to tweak your offer and improve return business. Peter Drucker wrote "The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous." If you have to use persuasive techniques or do a lot of personal selling of your product or service, then perhaps your marketing is not very effective. Do the groundwork and get the most effective message across.

Good luck with your venture.

[Dave A]

This really struck me:

Peter Drucker wrote "The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous." If you have to use persuasive techniques or do a lot of personal selling of your product or service, then perhaps your marketing is not very effective. Do the groundwork and get the most effective message across.

So how could we do that with Nienke's idea in fairly short order? Here's a thought:

Send an email to your accomodation supply prospects that appears to be targetted at people looking for a novel, cheap accomodation option.
Hit them again a couple of days later with a similar message.
Call them the following day (if they haven't called you already) asking if they'd be interested in a novel way to get low season bookings...

[Blurock]

This really struck me:


So how could we do that with Nienke's idea in fairly short order?

What Nienke is doing now is marketing. Marketing is a lot of hard work and elbow grease. Do it right and the sales will come from consumer demand, not from product push.

[mother]

I'm not yet open for business, because I want to present the customers a good choice, which at this stage I don’t have yet.

Nienke, it sounds like a great idea. You have obviously done your research and you are confident this concept will work. Now your challenge is to "sell" this concept to your suppliers and customers!

I would imagine that getting your suppliers(i.e. accommodation) on board will be easier than convincing your customers, since the whole world still bears the scars of the "timeshare"-epidemic of years gone by, and all the "creatively underhanded" marketing campaigns they tricked the public into.

But, as you mentioned, you first need a good selection of suppliers. If I were you I would tackle one town at a time. Get all the suppliers you can from there, then launch that town on your website (don't wait until you have the whole country, because people search for accommodation by destination). And do your homework in terms of each supplier you contact, so you know exactly how many rooms on average they battle to fill during out-of-season periods. So you start with the supplier who needs you the most. Yes, you will have to phone them and convince them to sit through a presentation. And like Blurock mentioned, it will save you a lot of time/money/effort if you could see them all at once to present the concept to them over breakfast/lunch. Perhaps try and arrange such a breakfast/lunch presentation at the supplier who needs you the least, i.e. the one with the least number of vacant rooms during off-peak times - that might create the impression to all the others that the most successful one amongst them is buying into this, so surely they should as well. But be completely honest beforehand about what you are going to show them, don't lure them there under false pretences.

Now regarding the cold calling you're gonna have to do here, perhaps you could try something I did to help one of my Tutors with her marketing. We are in an extremely competitive and sensitive market, and she couldn't get past the secretaries to arrange appointments with school principals. So I wrote a very short personal e-mail (you standardise it, and just change the names) which I addressed to the school principal (used her first name, no surnames and no titles, and used her direct e-mail address), and the e-mail listed 3 MAJOR problems all schools face, along with the 3 solutions we offer (bullet points for a quick read), then ended by asking what time during the day we could phone her to make an appointment to explain these so she could "make an informed decision about our value...". This e-mail had a 90% success rate, in that they phoned us to make the appointments.

As far as reaching your customers are concerned, I would definitely consider facebook ads to promote your website. In my experience it is money well-spent on reaching your actual target market, since there are so many parameters you can set.

[Blurock]

Good advice mother!

[Lee Hartman]

Hi,

Nice post. I think there is a big difference between emailing existing clients and canvasing to new prospects. regarding prospect emails - I myself delete all almost all unsolicited mass-generated emails. I do however read emails that have been personally addressed to me and where the sender has taken the time to understand me or my business. This is obviously hard and time consuming to do.

T think there is an art to sending prospecting emails. The header is key. Needs to be interesting but not gimmicky. someone mentioned it should add value that's probably a good start.