Email Advertising

what better place than here to ask-

an earlier post piqued my interest regarding advertising... we have done some email blitzing to a list of about 25k people but so far has only been moderately responsive.

my scenario: I have a couple of retail brick and mortar locations and I want to attract a new clientele. My direct mail campaign efforts pay off, but I think we are missing a part of the market that is oblivious to snail mail. We offer a medium to high end product in one location and the other location offers lower end product.

Here is the question- can I get email lists that serve my local geographic area? and can I get the same list broken down into demographic catagories ie home owners, hh income minimums, etc...

any secrets of the trade to get the people to open the email and act on it by coming into the location?

any direction is appreciated.

I've never heard of anyway or getting an e-mail list from someone for a specific area aside from building your own. Unfortunately that's one of the toughest parts. Anytime I've used other peoples mailing lists I've had very minimal response. Although you may be able to speak to your local chamber of commerce, they may be able to come up with something...I know they can breakdown a city by demograpics in a given area of town, maybe they're started some kind of e-mail thing or something.

After I built my database of contact info, I used to use a program called Indie Band Manager when I ran my concert promoting business. It was specifically made for managing bands, but the database functions in the program were awesome. It was very user friendly with making sub lists. The best part I made the most use of was the personalized e-mail list function. I would write one generic e-mail and the program would then create seperate e-mails and pull the recipients first name from the database and make the e-mail personalized to each receipient. So I select a list of say 50 people, I would type up one e-mail and the program would send out an individual personalized e-mails to each person on the list...with their e-mail as the only recipient and addressed to them by name. I got far more response from people simply becuase the e-mails were personalized...even got thank you replies commenting on how it was great that I send every single person on the list a seperate e-mail. Little did they know that I really didn't do any work. I just wrote one e-mail and clicked send and the program did all the seperating and personalizing. I don't know if there are other programs similar to this one, but it was well worth the $30 just for the database and e-mail capabilities alone I found.

One way of maybe getting people into the store....tell them in the e-mail to bring a friend into the store and the e-mail recipient gets a 10% discount or something if they both by something. Depending on the actual products you sell, what about a cross promotion? Bring a friend into the low end store and you get entered into a draw for a gift card for the highend store, but make the gift card at a smaller amount so inorder for them to use the gift card they have to spend some cash too? Then when the new friend comes in sign them up for the mailing list and get them to do the same....almost like a referal system to bring traffic in.