How to Boost Orders: 6 Critical Elements for Distributor Email Campaigns

As a distributor in the promotional products industry, you naturally have an interest in building and maintaining relationships with your clients and prospective clients. How else are you going to drive orders? As e-commerce becomes more and more prevalent, the industry grows increasingly competitive, so grabbing (and holding) your customers’ attention through email marketing is more important than ever. However, just because a distributor is doing email marketing, doesn’t mean that it’s actually helping boost orders.

Some distributors handle this problem by randomly pinging individuals on their contact list asking for their business and referrals. While that kind of one-to-one attention can help reinforce a personal relationship with your buyers, it can also annoy them (because what’s in it for THEM in that interaction?), and it can be impossible to sustain once your list grows beyond a hundred or so. And focusing only on your best customers can come with a price—after all, you never know where an order is going to come from.

But the fact remains that there’s real value in staying in touch. With your name regularly rolling across your contacts’ inboxes, you’re cultivating brand awareness (whether the brand is your name or your company name), meaning the next time one of your contacts is ready to buy, they’ll be much more likely to remember you.

So how do you do make that happen without being a pest? By crafting and executing great content, of course. Here are the 6 elements that make up high performing distributor email campaigns.

Great distributor email campaigns are…

 

1)…sent for a reason.

If you don’t have anything interesting to say, why are you contacting them? The rules of journalism apply just as much to marketing when it comes to what makes a piece of information newsworthy. Your buyers want to hear about products that are

A) interesting/relevant
B) new
C) timely (e.g., a sale or other limited-time special).

Don’t just send them an email saying “we sell branded apparel, drinkware, bags, writing instruments, etc.” Show them products that meet the criteria for A, B or C.

2)…value-added.

Don’t be a product-bot! Tell buyers why a particular product or type of product is of value to them. What kind of programs, events, audiences, etc. is this item perfect for? What are some creative ways it could be used to meet their organization’s goals? This is a chance to show off your creativity and position yourself as an expert. Don’t waste it by not giving the recipient a reason to keep reading.

3)…gorgeous.

We all know that campaigns that are unprofessional, unoriginal or just downright unattractive make it hard to be taken seriously, especially as a marketing and branding expert. But if you really want to stand out, it’s not enough to just barely squeak past the competition when it comes to visual appeal. You need to be striking. You need to draw in the reader’s eyes with a campaign that pops. You need to show that you keep up with the times by demonstrating an understanding of modern design trends. If you’re not experienced in email design, it’s highly recommended that you seek help with this step.

4)…seasonal.

This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many distributors forget to take advantage of seasonal buying opportunities. Reminding your buyers about seasonal occasions and how their business can benefit is a great way to check boxes A (interesting/relevant) and C (timely) on your “What’s in it for them?” checklist. Just be sure to time your campaign right: send too early and you’ll lose your seasonal impact; send too late and your customers won’t have enough time to buy before the season changes.

5)…bulletproof.

Do all the links work? Is the copy checked, double-checked and triple-checked? Does it work on mobile? Does it work across a variety of platforms and email clients? Does it comply with federal spam laws? Is there a browser version? Is there a text-only version? Is there a conspicuous, easy way to unsubscribe?

6)…regular.

Perhaps the most difficult step on this list. You put in a lot of effort to send out something great—you wrote it, designed it, tested it and executed it—and now you’re done. Whew! Unfortunately, you’re not done. To get the most benefit you need a regular publishing schedule, preferably twice a month. Can you do all that again every two weeks? Not every distributor has the time, inclination or skills to keep up with a full email marketing calendar, so all too often they produce a few campaigns and then lose momentum, defaulting back to what they were doing before. And that’s perfectly fine if you already have as much repeating, reliable business as you can handle.

If you’re a distributor who’s serious about increasing the number of orders you can get from your existing customer base, then email marketing is by far the most effective way to do this. But if you’re not putting out great email campaigns, then you’re going to fall short of your goal. Follow the checklist above for your next email campaign and see the difference for yourself.