How an e-mail marketing agency can help you build a rock-solid relationship with your biggest fans . . . even if you don’t know where to start.

Email Marketing is full of pitfalls.

You can be accused of being a spammer. Your email may not get through. You might be spending your time and get low returns. You might not have a very big list of people to mail to. You might not want to interfere with your printed mailings. You may not even believe in email marketing.

But what if I told you that an average order from an email recipient was worth over $200?

Email marketing is all about building a relationship. A long term relationship with the people who matter most. People who love you or one of your products.

But it takes effort and planning to do it well.

Here’s how an e-mail marketing agency can help you.

First we have to understand what your current marketing plans look like. What are your goals? How do you communicate with your customers now?

It’s important that your email marketing fit in with your existing marketing plans.

The result of this is a promotion schedule planned around your events, trade shows, product launches, promotions, and news.

Next we work on building your list. If you have email addresses currently, we formally ask their permission to receive your promotion and updates. This permission is critical to keeping you off spam blacklists and ensuring your emails get delivered.

We then look at your collection methods for email addresses on your website. Its not uncommon to increase the rate of email address collection by anywhere from 2 to 10 times. Over a year, that adds up to a lot of additional names.

Then we look at how you collect email addresses in your business and any events you participate in. We leave no stone unturned so we look at trade show and client lists also. Done properly this step can increase your list dramatically.

The result of this step is an email collection plan which optimizes how you collect permission based email address.

Next we research and design a creative mail layout. Email layout has to perform some very specific tasks if it is to be read. Not just any design will do. Not only that, it must look like it came from your winery and a real person there. Its that personal touch that makes it effective.

Finally email creation has to be designed not to run afoul of the various filters and image blocking systems your customers may be using in Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, and MS Outlook.

If, for example, image blocking is on, your reader cannot even see an image in your email. If you have nothing but images, they will see nothing.  If they see nothing they will order nothing.

So it’s critical for the design to work even if the images cannot be seen. No easy task.

In the old days of email marketing (a mere 18 months ago) it was normal to send a single email to everyone on your list – whether it was relevant to them or not.

You may have a private event for your best customers. You may then only want to send to people in your city and not everyone in every state, or every country even.

We do layout and test of email to ensure it is correct. We even send it to you for your final signoff before we send it to the whole list. Nothing is worse then the feeling of getting an email out the door only to find the link is broken. No orders come from that either.

We’ll then provide full statistics for you to review. How many people opened your email, how many clicked to your store and how many people elected to unsubscribe from your list.  If you do it wrong, people are one unsubscribe click away from not hearing from you again.

According to the CANSPAM legislation passed in 2003 and enacted in January of 2004 you must honor any unsubscribe requests you receive. We do that for you automatically and can verify every one was honored.

In short, we’re an e-mail marketing agency that will do the work — you make the money and get to focus on what you do best — run your business.

We only select a few clients each month to work with.