FloristWare Features: E-Mail Marketing

One of our competitors likes to tell people that FloristWare “doesn’t do” e-mail marketing.

This has always seemed kind of funny to us as we believe that we have the most sophisticated approach to e-mail marketing available. While our competitors promise the world and then give you only the most basic tools we give you a comprehensive system that works in the real world.

Our competitors love promoting the big blast approach - sending e-mail to everyone on your list all the time. They even go as far as to say that their systems automatically e-mail everyone on your list once a week automatically generating significant order volumes for you.

Let’s look at the problems with that:

What E-Mail Addresses?

They talk about e-mailing everyone on your list but they don’t give you tools to collect those e-mail addresses. FloristWare has the most complete set of tools for collecting e-mails addresses.

It Just Doesn’t Work!

All these promises about everything being automatic are to make you think that you don’t have to do anything and that the system will just generate orders for you all day long. Life should be so easy!

The problem is that automatic generally means simple & dumb. In this case it means sending the same e-mail to everyone on your list over and over again. Why is this bad?

Firstly it just doesn’t work. Sending out more e-mail does not automatically equal more orders. It takes some degree of work to craft meaningful messages and offers that will interest your customers and generate a response.

Secondly - it just annoys your customers. They are going to be getting the same (remember, it’s all automatic which means the message doesn’t change!) e-mail from you week after week. Nobody likes this. You become just another spammer.

If you’re lucky they’ll just ignore your e-mails. Of course they might flag your e-mail as junk which means you can no longer get through to them when you have something meaningful.

Worst of all they might report you. And without the advanced list management features in FloristWare you may quickly be facing fines and/or incarceration for failing to comply with the CANSPAM act.

This approach also makes the mistake of treating all your customers the same way. Would you want to promote a value special (Example: Two Dozen Roses for $39.95) to customers who routinely spend more than that? Of course not - you’re just training them to spend less! You want to promote value specials to value customers and premium specials to premium customers.

Worst of all is the fact even if this approach did work you would still fail. Let’s say you sent 1,000 e-mails today and - by some miracle - you did get the 5% response rate that our competitors love to mention. Is that a good thing?

Could your store handle an extra fifty orders in one day? Probably not. That means that you sent out an e-mail promising something to your customers. If they respond you are not able to deliver. Is that really what you want?

These are the reasons that we suggest you save the Big Blast for special occasions and use our much more sophisticated “trickle” approach the rest of the time.

The first step in any e-mail marketing program is collecting customer’s e-mail addresses. If you don’t have addresses on file you don’t have anybody to send marketing e-mails to.

Collecting e-mail addresses is somewhat tricky because customers are generally reluctant to share their e-mail addresses. And with good reason - they don’t want to be the recipient of the kind of constant, generic spam that our competitors champion.

It’s really a little negotiation - you want the customer’s e-mail address and they don’t want to give it to you. You have to offer them some kind of value in return. If you do that they’ll be delighted to give you their e-mail address.

FloristWare gives you more tools to help in the collection of e-mail addresses than any other system. Let’s take a look:

Points Program

FloristWare includes a points-based incentive program. This type of program (LINK) has proven to be one of the most effective ways to increase customer loyalty and spending. It can also help with the collection of e-mail addresses - you can limit enrollment in the program to people who provide their e-mail addresses. If they want points they have to give you their e-mail address first!

Points Program - Bonus Points

This extension of the points program is based on the practices of the most successful incentive programs out there. It allows you to award special “bonus” points to customers who share the information you are most interested in collecting - usually their e-mail address.

Product Photographs (During Sale)

During the process of taking a telephone order FloristWare gives you the option of e-mailing photographs of the products being discussed directly to the customer. Not only is this a proven way of improving customer service (they don’t do this at the grocery store!) and increasing average order value (a picture is worth a thousand words and a photo of an upscale product can go a long way towards convincing a customer to spend a little more than they planned) it also gives the customer another reason to want to give you their e-mail address.

Receipts & Invoices

After you have completed an order FloristWare gives you the option of sending a detailed receipt or invoice directly to the customer with just one click. This of course works great for phone orders but some customers also prefer to get their receipt this way even if they walked in! In addition to being a proven method of reducing errors (customers are encouraged to check their detailed receipt for any inaccuracies and often catch problems like color, delivery date, etc.) it also gives the customer another reason to share their e-mail address with you.

Reminder Service

FloristWare includes a “Reminder” service. You ask customers if they would like to be reminded in advance about special events like birthdays, anniversaries, etc. and FloristWare runs the program for you. Here you are offering a valuable service and all you are asking for in return is an e-mail address so that you can notify the customer as requested.

Delivery Confirmations

FloristWare can also automate the process of sending delivery confirmations - an e-mail that goes to the customer once the driver has logged the delivery. This is a valuable service that customers love but of course you need their e-mail to make it work! When you are offering a service like this they will gladly give it to you.

As we have discussed FloristWare excels at helping you build your list of customer e-mail addresses. Now we’ll talk about what we can do with those addresses:

Reminder E-Mails

Reminder E-Mails are sent out to remind customers about special dates (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.) that you have noted in their file.

The system can use them a few different ways. Each day it will tell you what if any reminders need to be sent by taking you through a list. Each reminder is presented to you for review along with notes on the customer, their spending habits, etc.

Why do we do this? To help you excel at customer service. If for example you see that a customer is a big spender you might decide to skip the e-mail and call them instead - going that extra mile to impress them with your commitment to service. And of course in some cases you may not have an e-mail address on file making a reminder call your only option.

Let’s say you would rather e-mail them. FloristWare starts off by preparing a draft e-mail using the template that you have created and the information on the customer and occasion that is stored in the system and presents it to you for review. You can send it as is or customize it based on what you see in the customer summary.

Why would you do this? Once again to provide a higher level of customer service. If you noticed that certain customer routinely spent more money than average and it was their anniversary you might want to spend a moment extra tailoring their message just for them. And if that customer was (for example) away for the winter you might want to mention that you can take care of them wherever they are. Or maybe it’s a customer you recognize and you just want to add a personal touch. All of these things will make your reminder campaign more effective.

But let’s say you don’t have time for that. No problem! You can click the “Send All Now” button to send any pending reminders by e-mail immediately or just make a change to your settings and all relevant reminders will go out each morning.

Sales E-Mails - Big Blast

Earlier on we mentioned the “big blast” approach (sending e-mails to everyone on your list all at once) and how we did not agree with our competitors who suggest doing it on a regular basis. There are however times a modified version of this approach is completely acceptable.

The best example is in advance of a big floral holiday. We would suggest sending e-mails to most everyone on your list in advance of holidays like Valentines, Mother’s Day, etc. In fact we’d probably suggest sending them out as much as once a week for four to six weeks prior, the goal being to encourage the customers to pre-order.

We would also suggest that you use the excellent list-building features in FloristWare to target your lists. If for example you are going to mention price points in an e-mail you would be well advised to have different lists for different kinds of spenders - you never want to encourage people to spend less than they have in the past. The list-building features in FloristWare make this kind of targeting easy.

FloristWare also helps you keep track of who is interested in what holidays. For example if you have a large Jewish clientele that is not interested in Christmas flowers, FloristWare can help you refine your lists accordingly. Likewise it can help you generate a list of people who are interested in flowers for the Jewish High Holidays.

So - while we don’t like using the “big blast” approach on an ongoing basis we do offer it and give you tools to do it as well as it can be done - especially when it is appropriate.

Sales E-Mails - Trickle

As we have mentioned there are times when it’s okay to use a modified version of the “big blast” approach but it’s not effective on an ongoing basis. We prefer the much more sophisticated “trickle” approach.

Here’s how it works. We start off by having you enter the number of days you would like to leave between marketing attempts - we never want to “bug” your customers by contacting them to often.

We then take the number of people in your list and divide it by the number of days specified. So if for example you had 1200 people in your database and specified a thirty day window between marketing attempts it gives us the number 40.

That means that we are going to e-mail forty of the people on your list each day. Instead of sending a big blast and hoping for an avalanche of orders once a week or once a month we’re going to try and get a few more orders each day instead.

How does it work? Each day FloristWare will try and take you through a list of all of the sales calls/e-mails that are scheduled to be made. Once again you are presented with the customer information and are given the choice of phoning them (based on what see and whether they have an e-mail address of file) or sending an e-mail.

Just like with the reminder e-mails FloristWare starts by preparing a draft based on the template that you have specified and presenting it to you for review. Once again you can customize the message based on the customer notes and/or what you know/remember about them.

If that sounds like too much work you can always just click the “Send All Now” to have all of the remaining sales e-mails go out immediately or you can just make a change to your settings and any scheduled sales e-mails will automatically go out each morning.

There are two main types of e-mail that you can send for marketing purposes.

The first is the old-fashioned “words only” type referred to as “Plain Text”. It looks like what the name suggests - a simple text only e-mail.

The advantage to this type of e-mail is that everyone can see it and it’s easy to create. The disadvantage is that it’s kind of boring.

The other kind of e-mail you can send is called “HTML” e-mail. It gives you pretty much all of the design options you would get with a web page.

The advantage to HTML e-mail is that it can look great and it gives you more options - you can have pictures, links to specific products on your website and more.

What kind does FloristWare support? Both!

Sending plain-text e-mail could not be easier. You simply type the message into FloristWare and it will spell-check it for you. It can also automatically customize each e-mail by inserting the customers name. You then just click a button and it starts to send.

HTML e-mail is just as easy. You create the design of the e-mail in an HTML editor (the same kind of application used for creating web pages) and then just drop it into a field in FloristWare and click “Send”.

But it gets even better - remember how we said that HTML was probably better in that it gave you so much flexibility in design but that there was a major drawback in that not everyone has an e-mail application that will let them see it?

FloristWare gets around this problem using MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). What this means is that it sends one email that sends both the plain-text and html versions so that anyone who reads your e-mail will see it in the best light possible.

When it comes to sending FloristWare gives you two different options. The first option is to send your e-mail through the system. This is very quick and easy to do.

Some users who have very large customer lists and/or restrictive ISPs (Internet Service Providers) may run into problems with this approach. ISPs do not like the idea of their users sending spam over their network so they try and identify this kind of activity and block it.

FloristWare gives you a number of different tools to stay “under the radar” but in the even that they are not successful you can take advantage of the second option - one that many florists (especially those with very large customer lists) choose anyway.

This approach involves exporting your list of e-mail addresses to a spreadsheet and sending it - along with the content of your e-mail - to an e-mail marketing service like Constant Contact or Magnet Mail who take care of actually sending it out. There are many advantages to this option such as advanced tracking.

E-Mail marketing is something that you should do but it’s not something you can be cavalier about. Did you know that the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (15 U.S.C. 7701, et seq., Public Law No. 108-187) places significant expectations on anyone who chooses to market through e-mail. Failure to comply can result in heavy fines and/or incarceration.

As a legitimate marketer your biggest concern is the “unsubscribe” process. Every marketing e-mail that you send must contain a “visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism”. This means they have to include that little line you see on e-mails that says something like “Click here if you would like to be removed from our mailing list”.

What happens after that button is clicked? According to the act consumer opt-out requests must be honored within 10 days. How does that happen?

With most POS systems you then have to go back into your database, find the customer’s record and flag them as being exempt from future e-mail marketing efforts - assuming your system supports this. Many don’t! This means that you have no choice but to either delete their customer record entirely or delete their e-mail address - meaning that you no longer have it for legitimate reasons like e-mailing receipts, invoices, etc.

FloristWare allows you to tailor your marketing aggression on a per-person basis. You can specify whether each person in your database is exempt from receiving marketing phone calls and/or e-mails (both are tracked separately).

But FloristWare takes it even one step further! It can automatically retrieve and process those “unsubscribe” requests for you. For example - you send a marketing e-mail to someone in your database and they click the “Please remove me from your list” option which sends an e-mail. FloristWare picks it up, finds that person’s record in the database and flags them as being exempt from marketing e-mails in the future.

To the best of our knowledge no other system is this powerful!