I continually am amazed at the number of offers I receive, on a daily basis, for such products and services as: how to get new clients, health drinks, smoothies, pills and other various concoctions: not to mention the get rich quick schemes involving Wall Street trading loop holes, debt reduction, weight loss, fighting IRS, home remodeling and on and on.
It is pure spam. And while I spend at least 15 minutes a day unsubscribing from this “junk” every day, is it any wonder that the open rates on email have plummeted to an average range of 8 percent (to 13 percent).
So even if you’re sending emails to people that subscribed you might be sending the wrong email to the wrong segment, thus frustrating your audience with an irrelevant message. Think about sending a Cosmic email to a 60 year old? How long do you think they will stay subscribed to your website?
“But I don’t have birthdays of people on my email list, Fred.”
I know you don’t…but there is something you can do about it. In fact you can do something with every email you send.
Whenever you send an email, ask the person you are mailing to send you their birthday month, gender and what time of the day and days they would be most likely to bowl. In return, you will email them a $10 bowling gift certificate.
This should be on the bottom of every email or experiment and put it on the top of the email. Use a subject line that reads “Here’s how to get $10 in bowling games.” Tell people the reason that you want this information is so you can send them information relevant to their bowling activity. The more you do this, the more birthday information and gender data you can fill in. You might not get it all. But every one you get is one more relevant contact.
You can also realign your data base card when collecting information at the center. The form should include the following
Person’s first and last name _________________________________________
Address, city, state, zip phone number _____________________________
email______________________
phone________________________
Birthday month and year
Month_______ Year ________
Gender: Male _______ Female ______
Are you interested in: short season bowling programs yes____
information about fundraisers yes ____
information about company parties yes_____
Every line should be boxed so people will be forced to print as opposed to scribbling the information which will be unusable. This is absolutely essential to get more usable information.
Bottom Line: You need to segment your data base as finely as you possibly can. Age and gender are just a start.
So start!
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