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.
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