Holiday eMarketing: Selling the Bright and Shiny…and Saving the Bacon?
Posted on | December 18, 2009 | No Comments
Ho. Ho. Ho. What are YOU doing this holiday season to stay in touch with your customers?
A unique woven metal Tahmi pendant
Tahmi DeSchepper, a jewelry designer based in the Midwest, is using eMarketing tools to tell customers about how they can easily reach her during the holidays to buy great gifts for their circle of friends and relatives… or, even, for themselves!
In these tough economic times, when merchants are busy competing with one another for limited holiday dollars, Tahmi is sending holiday messages to targeted lists of friends and followers to alert them to fine arts and crafts shows where she’s exhibiting. And it’s a good thing she is.
After one recent show in Chicago, Tahmi learned a valuable eMarketing lesson: “I can safely say that in all the years I’ve been doing shows, this was probably the least populated. The foot traffic was really bad. A lot of vendors had no sales at all, but I actually had business. It came from customers who received my email marketing and who came out to see me at the show. The results of that emailing showed me the value of talking to my existing customer base. The event would have been a complete disaster, but the email campaign saved my bacon!” (Tahmi is an Ennect Mail user.)
Tahmi ‘s involvement in jewelry design started about ten years ago as a hobby. It was something to do during the down time when she was on the road with her job as a telecom consultant. It turned into a real paying passion when a manager at a museum store in Des Moines became interested in displaying her work. Her tech background made her a natural candidate for selling over the web and her affinity for eMarketing came early. After receiving a referral from a business colleague, she started using Ennect Mail to promote her designs and her site.
Building an initial email list took a bit of time, but today Tahmi now has a qualified list of over 1,000 email addresses which she collected directly from paying customers. “Eighty to eighty-five percent of my sales are credit card-based. Rather than write down their addresses and phone numbers, people are very willing to give me their email addresses. That’s how I built my list,” says Tahmi. Her retail list is segmented geographically by the areas where she exhibits in regional crafts shows. “This way, I can fine-tune my messages to the people who are most likely to be interested.”
When Tahmi has a message to get out to all her retail clients – like a recent email announcing her renovated website that included special discounts for her customers – she can easily mail to all her retail lists.
Since she also sells to galleries across the country, Tahmi has a separate list for gallery owners. “But,” she says, “It’s taken a longer time for art galleries to get onboard with technology. They always ask me to send them postcards or flyers. They’re very tactile and aren’t really comfortable looking at computer screens yet.” But – even for gallery owners – the times are ‘a changin’ and Tahmi now has an email list that covers about two-thirds of her gallery clients.
Ennect keeps track of her lists and recipients who open her emails. It also tracks opt-outs as well as bounces.
If you’d like to see Tahmi’s jewelry – or receive discount alerts or updates about her latest woven precious metal wire jewelry designs – you can sign up for email alerts on her website here: http://www.tahmi.com/cart.html.
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