Email Marketing for your trade Show

From the daily onslaught of email spams and newsletters filling inboxes, you would think that email marketing is losing its punch. Email marketing is not dead, but a thriving medium for business today.

Recently, I developed an email newsletter marketing campaign for a company. The results exceeded the expectations of everyone involved. This campaign employed an email newsletter subscription with an offline "magic box". This box was intended to collect and warm the leads for the sales force. Instead of warming the leads, the campaign closed the sale without contact from the sales rep and increased sales over 30%.

Business today is finding email marketing with newsletters attractive for several reasons:

The cost of sending a direct mail piece by postal service runs over a dollar, email marketing can cost pennies.

A one percent response rate from direct mail is considered terrific. An email marketing campaign can have a five to ten percent response rate.

According to DoubleClick's Email Consumer Study, over 78% of online shoppers have purchased because of permission-based emails and 59% of email recipients have bought in a retail store as a result of a merchant email.

The benefits of email marketing range from increased sales and lead generation to stronger brand awareness and improved customer relationships.

• If you operate a booth at a tradeshow, and you collect business cards from people who visit the booth, send them a personal, one-to-one email replete with sales pitch and a link to your email subscriber form, so you can stay in regular contact. Give them a link to a landing page on your website with a valuable whitepaper, which also contains a link to your newsletter. Insert full page advertisements on your whitepaper that point back to your newsletter signup form.

• Maintain contacts, but categorize them appropriately. A “lead” that you met at a tradeshow is someone you can keep in your CRM to contact some day (“Hi Bob, we met at the Acme Widgets Show. If you’ve still got a need for enterprise Acme monitoring services, our company just introduced…”). But that “lead” is NOT someone you can add to a big marketing mailing list. If they receive mass email from you out of the blue, they’ll report you for spamming.

• If you operate a tradeshow booth and the tradeshow host offers to give you an email list of all attendees do not import it into your mass marketing list. You could send them personal, one-to-one messages before the event (from your own email program, not en masse from an email marketing service), inviting them to your booth. Yes, that’s a royal pain in the you-know-what. The tradeshow organizer should be sending emails for you as recipients will probably recognize them better.

• On rare occasions, we’ve seen tradeshow organizers include opt-in checkboxes, where attendees can request emails from exhibitors at the show. On confirmation, send a mass email ASAP. If you just add this “opt-in list” to your general marketing list, and these attendees get your Quarterly Newsletter out of the blue, they’ll probably report you for spamming.

• If you collect email addresses while exhibiting at a tradeshow, consider keeping that as a separate list, or flagging them in your master database. That way, you can see who came from where, and isolate any email delivery problems by “source of list” if you need to. Responsible email marketers randomly decide to import a list of people their sales team met at a tradeshow. Those tradeshow attendees forget who you are, or receive an email they don’t think is relevant, and report the company for spamming. If they can’t delete all those tradeshow attendees from their list, their entire list is basically tainted.

• Fish bowls are a bad, bad idea. For adding emails to your list, that is. When collecting business cards in a fishbowl at your booth, avoid subscribing the email addresses to your e-marketing list. You can crack-berry those people and ask them if they want to subscribe for email marketing. Just make sure you send your first email marketing campaign to these people soon after the event, and be sure to refer to the tradeshow in that first email to them (“Hi Jane, thanks for visiting our booth at the Acme Tradeshow…”).

IGMCreativeGroup.com is an advertising agency, online marketing and web development firm, which offers simple brand building solutions within a conservative budget without the traditional elaborateness. We help launch cohesive, effective and comprehensive marketing campaigns for ensuring visibility and profitability of your business.