The Next Step
Just as The Brickery was becoming more comfortable and confident with its email campaigns, Microsoft announced that it would no longer support its email marketing platform. The Brickery was recommended to Listrak and it knew that Listrak could take their campaigns to the next level. Most importantly, Bruce and Sally knew that Listrak shared their values in the way they build customer relationships and offer personal service. In a note to Listrak, Bruce writes, “I wanted to take a moment to let you and your staff know how pleased I am with our recent move to Listrak. As a bCentral customer for years, I can tell you that there is no comparison. For us, it’s all about the service… personal service… you guys provide.
“The tech people are available, patient, and knowledgeable. They have put us on track to a better understanding of how to manage our lists, and we have never had a better open rate. Your initial orientation and training created the opportunity for us to now easily navigate your web site in sending out messages, and even more importantly, a much better mechanism to measure response.
“As an independent restaurant, operating in a big market, our permission based email program has become the most important marketing tool we have. We are getting outstanding response, and we are excited about maximizing its potential. It is more than nice to tell you that our move to Listrak pretty much assures that we will be able to do just that.”
Listrak made sure that the transition from bCentral was smooth and seamless for The Brickery. And Listrak is helping The Brickery understand the two biggest challenges for email marketers – deliverability and rendering. Listrak provides advanced deliverability tools, such as authentication and accreditation tools, deliverability policy management, Spam score, abuse process system, global suppression system, by-ISP deliverability reporting, sender score, and delivery reporting, and it helps its customers understand how to maintain a good reputation in order to ensure deliverability. With these tools, The Brickery can track hard and soft bounces so it can quickly identify and fix any problems.
Listrak also provides tips and best practices to ensure that emails render properly in different email clients. After all, delivery is only part of the problem. If the emails are received but the graphics are missing or the formatting is incorrect, it could cause the recipients to report the email as spam and it could damage The Brickery’s reputation.
Learning how to combat these two issues has greatly increased the response The Brickery is seeing in its email campaigns. However, The Brickery is positioning itself to take its email campaigns to the next level as it is now learning about profiling and segmentation through Listrak.
Listrak is helping The Brickery realize that there are more important metrics than just the open and read rate. While a read rate of 35 percent is very high, it means that 65 percent of the contacts did not read the message. Listrak is helping The Brickery realize the potential of using customer preferences and segmenting their lists so it can send targeted email messages to a smaller segment of their list instead of sending one general email to everyone. This will greatly increase the read rates as the emails will be individualized to each contact. More importantly, this will increase business as The Brickery can target specific patrons with the offers that have the best possibility of generating business. It will also help strengthen the relationships The Brickery has with its patrons.
For example, The Brickery could send out special emails to its lunch crowd offering a free entrée if they bring their families in for dinner or it could offer an extra discount off if contacts try a new dish. Knowing customer preferences will also help The Brickery create special events such as wine tastings or dinner parties for preferred customers. Recent studies show that targeted messages that are relevant to customers may increase net profits averaging 18 times over more general broadcast communications, and The Brickery is positioning itself to offer more personalized, segmented messages to its preferred customers, which helps cultivate the customer relationships.
