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Thread: How to run an email marketing campaign!

  1. #11
    Diamond Member Blurock's Avatar
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    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.
    Excellence is not a skill; its an attitude...

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  3. #12
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    In order to have a good marketing campaign, you must first define the image you want to portray. Then, you have to organize lists with contacts! You can use a time management solution, have you ever try Taskwise? You can sign up for a free account today, check out the website!

  4. #13
    Email problem mother's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nienke View Post
    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.

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    Blurock (09-Aug-11), Nienke (12-Aug-11)

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    Diamond Member Blurock's Avatar
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    Good advice mother!
    Excellence is not a skill; its an attitude...

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    Mirelle (25-Aug-11), mother (10-Aug-11)

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    Email problem mother's Avatar
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    Aw thanx, Blurock.

    One more thing I forgot to add, Nienke... I would recommend you avoid the phrase FREE ACCOMMODATION. Everyone knows that absolutely nothing in life is free, and using that phrase (in my opinion), might make people suspicious, thinking you are hiding something. The truth of the matter is, they will have to pay for 4 meals in order to stay there, so in fact it's not free, it's just a bargain. Perhaps rather use a phrase like "you only pay for your meals", or something like that.

    Perhaps some other members would like to share their views on this as well?

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    Site Caretaker Dave A's Avatar
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    This really struck me:

    Quote Originally Posted by Blurock View Post
    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...

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    Wow guys, this is great and extremely helpful!

    @Blurock: The idea to organize get-togethers in specific towns is a marvelous idea, especially since I can see it being nice for the accommodations to meet each other all. This will take a lot of work and planning though, but I'll definitely get on this one

    @Mother: I am very impressed you got a 90% active response on your mailing. And I see why. The idea of letting them know you understand their problem and providing a solution straight away is pretty clever. I’ll go and change my standard email I’m sending out.
    Regarding the ‘Free’ comment, I might agree on the one hand, but then again you do still get your accommodation, your room, for free. Yes, you pay for the food, but not for your room. But I must say, when I explain this to friends of mine, their first reaction is :”What’s the catch?”. Apparently you South Africans are very suspicious people! I’ll give this some thought, since this is what makes me different from the 1000’s of booking sites out there.

    I must say, I’m quite happy with my cold calling so far, the positive feedback is about 83%, with which I’m very happy with. I’m only very disappointed in the incredible long process I have to go through with each accommodation before they are actually signing up. The commit very early in the beginning, but this doesn’t translate in actual sign ups. Still need to figure out how to do this one.


    All: Thanks a lot for all your input, you’ve given me even more work and things to think about then I already had! Much appreciated!

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    Diamond Member Blurock's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dave A View Post
    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.
    Excellence is not a skill; its an attitude...

  12. #19
    Email problem
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    Hi

    Is it possible to send an email to 1 Mil+ email users using a dedicated server? What are the precautions one could take?

  13. #20
    Site Caretaker Dave A's Avatar
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    If you're asking the question, I suggest you're a very long way from being up to it. Sure, you'll be able to send them, but I wouldn't count on too many being delivered.

    Ensuring mass email delivery is quite a challenge on a number of fronts quite apart from the actual content.

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