E-mail marketing: does it really work?

These days we are all barraged with e-mail messages from people we don't know trying to sell us something. Every day our inboxes are full of offers for stuff that we don't want, don't need or find downright offensive. It's like the old days of door-to-door salesmen gone out of control. (Though in the old days we couldn't hit a delete key to get rid of the salesman.)

Yet among all the spam, there are probably offers that you are glad to get. A major office supply store sending a coupon off your next purchase, an on-line bookseller telling you about a new release on a topic you've purchased in the past.

Maybe you've thought about using e-mail as a marketing tool for your farm. Maybe you've even tried it. It's certainly a cost effective method of getting a message to potential customers. Other than your monthly service fee, sending e-mail costs nothing. That's why there are so many spammers out there.

But because spam is so pervasive, it leads one to wonder whether the spammers have ruined a good thing for the rest of us. Has the peak effectiveness of e-mail marketing come and gone? Not necessarily.

No doubt spam has made people annoyed, jaded and all too quick to hit delete. But if there is a deciding factor in whether you hit delete or print, it has to be trust. Most likely those messages that you're glad to receive are from companies with which you've done business. You recognize the name, you have a relationship and you probably signed up to be on their e-mail list.

That's why e-mail marketing can be effective for farm businesses in particular. For one thing, trust is easy to establish. Most likely you'll develop your e-mail list from customers who sign up at your farmstand, at a trade show or on your website. They've opted in to your list and will recognize your name when the message arrives. You're not likely to join the ranks of spammers unless you purchase a mass e-mail list from someone or use web spider software to harvest e-mail addresses from websites like they do.

And the immediacy of e-mail can be a real communications advantage in an industry where product availability can change with the weather. If the strawberries are late, or the tomatoes are coming in early, or the blueberries are all picked out, you can let your customers know right away.

There are a few things to consider if you're going to get into e-mail marketing. How are you going to manage your e-mail list? The most basic way is to add your customers to the address book in your e-mail program and set up a distribution list if your software provides that function. As your list grows, however, it will become more and more unwieldy to manage.

If you do address your e-mail to a list of contacts from your address book, it's a good idea to put the list in the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) field rather than the To field. That way everyone on the list won't have access to your list and you'll protect their privacy.

For a maintenance free list, consider using list server software, which your Internet service provider may offer, or use a list server service. In either case, customers can subscribe and unsubscribe themselves.

Format is another consideration. Most e-mail programs now to send and receive e-mail in HTML (hypertext markup language) format. That means you can design the body of your e-mail message in much the same way that you would design a web page, with fonts, colors and images. That ability can really enhance your marketing message but you do have to take into consideration the folks out there who may still be using plain text e-mail.

Here's a tip to ensure that your information will be easily readable for all. Before you send your first e-newsletter or announcement, send a draft of your message to a few friends who have different e-mail services and software. Then find out how it looked on their end. This will give you the opportunity to make adjustments before sending to your entire list.

There are a couple things you can do to bolster the authenticity of your message. Make sure that the identity that you specify when setting up your e-mail account on your computer is something that your customers will recognize, for example your farm name. (This can be changed at any time.)

The subject line is also important. Spammers have all kinds of tricks to make a message look like it's from a friend or business associate. They also use very vague subjects to fool spam blocker programs. The clearer and more specific you can make your subject line, the more likely your customer will recognize the message as relevant to them.

So, with the trusting relationships that you've already established with your customers, the great seasonal products you have to offer, a few technical considerations and no cost involved, e-mail can be another effective marketing tool at your disposal.

Copyright: Diane Baedeker Petit

This article orginally appeared in the November 2005 issue of Growing magazine.