Expanded e-mail marketing helps increase sales at AmericanMeadows.com

An expanded e-mail marketing program is helping to increase sales at wildflower seed site AmericanMeadows.com, according to CEO Ray Allen.

American Meadows, which also relaunched its site in January, switched to e-mail marketing vendor Bronto.com about two months ago, Allen says. Until then, American Meadows had been managing its outbound e-mail program using the software program it had used since its original launch five years ago.

With the house e-mail list now at 50,000, “it was time to professionalize it,” says Allen. “The program was never designed to hold that many names.” The new e-mail marketing program also will provide data, such as open rates, that American Meadows wasn’t getting under its former system.

Allen adds that American Meadows sends e-mail to its entire list weekly. Though the unsubscribe rate is virtually nil-a function, he speculates, of customers’ affinity for the category-he’ll be adding segmented mailings going forward because the new program interface makes that easier to do.

Allen also notes that a spam tester function on Bronto’s interface is helping to keep American Meadows’s marketing e-mails clear of spam filters. The test filter scans the copy in marketing e-mails before they go out and assigns them a score based on the likelihood that anything in them would be stopped by spam filters used by the intended recipients. “The lower the score, the greater the likelihood that the e-mail will get through,” Allen says. “I try to get it to zero each time.”

AmericanMeadows.com’s sales have doubled over the last three years, for a sustained annual growth during that time of more than 33% a year, Allen says.