Business to Business Expo in Daytona Beach

Business to Business Expo

 

The Callan Group hosted a booth at the recent Business to Business Expo last week at the Ocean Center. It was a very nice turn out for being a first year event. Our booth was slammed almost the entire time with local business owners inquiring about the best way to send out email newsletters. They had a number of questions that I thought would be good to feature in our blog:

 

1.) Where do you get email addresses?

We only send out e-newsletters to our client’s clients. In other words, if we have Restaurant 123 as a client, they obtain email addresses from all their patrons and then we send out the newsletter to only those individuals. We provide comment cards to our clients to help them capture email addresses. On the comment card it states that their email address will never be sold nor shared to any third parties for any reason. This is very important as many people are sensitive to giving out their email address because they are afraid of spam. Also, we encourage each of our clients to offer a reward/incentive to signing up for their email newsletter. Many of our clients offer $5 off their next visit just for signing up.

 

We do not recommend buying email lists. Unless the individual signed up to receive more information chances are they do not want to hear from you and will just delete the email.

 

2.) How do you prevent the email from going into the junk mailbox?

This depends on each recipient’s security settings but a few things can assist in getting emails to come through in the inbox instead of the junk mailbox. Your server must have an excellent reputation with the big boys (hotmail, gmail, yahoo, aol, etc.) meaning that they have been in business for a long time, do not send spam and have been watched so that the big boys see them as a trusted source. Our server is out of Spring Hill and has an excellent reputation with all major search engines. Also, you want to refrain from putting words in the subject line like SPECIAL, BUY NOW, etc. that many times are triggers for spam settings to throw the email in the junk mailbox. Most importantly we encourage our clients to have other means of communication and to view the e-newsletter as a vehicle for conversation. “Did you receive my e-newsletter?” “Yes, I did. It’s very nice!” Well, great! I’m glad you received it. Did you read about our special this month where we are featuring buy one get one free?” This communication on top of the e-newsletter makes any sales calls much warmer than before.

 

More questions to come in future blogs.