Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 10. Hard to believe. We're already at episode 10. Thanks for listening, and I hope you're gaining insights. You can apply to your everyday workflow to make your business easier and a little bit more profitable. In this episode, we'll talk about email marketing and discuss the sinister change and open rate reporting that no one's talking about. Jumping right in. If you've been in business for a while, you're probably using email marketing as a way to keep customers updated on new arrivals, sales, promotions, events, and other news about your business. Email marketing is a great and pretty affordable way to reach customers quickly. Most email marketing software is charged by list size and allow you to send unlimited emails to your customers. The two biggest players in this space for small businesses are MailChimp and Constant Contact. There isn't much difference between them and other tools.

They all have templates. You can customize your preschedule emails at your convenience. So what should you look for when choosing a provider? Honestly, I wouldn't spend too much time on selecting a provider. They're all very similar. I would just make sure that it syncs with your POS and website cause you don't want to added work of managing lists and that they aren't overcharging you. For a list size of two to 3000 emails, you should be paying anywhere from 30 to $50 a month. If you have a larger list of 10, 15,000 emails, maybe you're gonna spend 150 to 175 a month. And if you have a really small list of under 500 people, which honestly it should be free or $10 a month at the most. Another question we hear often is, how often should you be sending out emails? Well, there's no right answer here, but there is a range that makes sense for most.

If you're running a basic email marketing program, you should be sending emails anywhere from two to eight times a month. If you're only hitting your customers once a month, it's likely not enough. And if you're sending out emails more than twice a week, you're probably sending too many. Um, or you'd better have something new in stock or something fun to talk about each time you're sending an email because customers will get sick of you really quick. Now, let's get into a topic that email software providers are hoping stays hidden. Open rates. Historically, open rates were the statistic that marketers used to determine if they were successful. So what is an open rate? It's supposed to be the percentage of customers that you sent out emails to who actually opened and read your emails. This would be a great indicator of list health and customer engagement.

You should be able to use this as a signal to keep sending the same content or to change it up. If your open rates are staying stable or going up, you're doing a good job. If your open rates are going down consistently and you're getting a lot of unsubscribes over time, you might wanna change it up. You might wanna send emails less or you might wanna send different types of emails. That being said, open rates cannot be relied upon anymore. We all heard about how Apple made privacy changes and how it impacted Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and basically any online advertising you're doing. What you probably have not heard about is that they made privacy changes that impacted email open rate stats. So what happened and why does it matter? Around the year ago, Apple made changes that impacted email data. Prior to the change, you would send the email to the customer with Apple Mail, they would open it and it would get added to your open rate. Now after the change, when you send an email to a customer with Apple Mail on their phone, Apple wants to hide open rate data from you. So they will route and download the email before the customer opens it and send it to you.

You as opened, whether or not the customer actually opened it. How many people does this impact? A lot. How many people around you have Apple devices and use mail on their phone? It's in the hundreds of millions in the United States. So you may ask, Why would Apple do this? It's pretty simple. Apple as a software and Harbor provider wants to protect their customers. Their customers are the same people as your customers, and they view you end email marketing platforms as somewhat as an enemy. Now, enemy is definitely the wrong word to say, but they don't want you to be able to use their customer's data and use it against their customer the end of the day. They want their customer to have privacy. And if you're an iPhone user, you probably agree. You don't want companies to know what you're doing when you're doing it.

It's your privacy and they want to keep it private. So this puts email platforms in a really weird spot. They can either choose to tell you the truth and help you find other metrics besides open rates that actually tell the story of how your email marketing is doing, or they can hide this fact from you. Continue to provide you with open rates that are unrealistic, but you'll view them as winners because your open rates are going up instead of 10% of E people opening your emails. Not 20, 30, 40% of people are opening your emails and you think that you're doing great, but really you're not. So have you seen your open rates go up over the last 12 months? How much are they up? Are they up? Double, triple? If you're seeing these things, it's likely that it's fake and your emails are not being read.

So what do we do with this info? Well, as small business owners, we need to find a way to make a real and meaningful connection with customers. Don't take emails and throw them away, but know that you cannot rely on any piece of tech or marketing to create and hold that connection with the customer. You need to build that connection by actually connecting with them. Be important to them. Be real, be you. Make your business a part of their lives. An open rate. Can't take that away from you. Thanks for listening. See you guys next.