We finally gave in to grown-up marketing.
(Now we know why we put it off for so long.)
I like my customers. Heck, I LOVE my customers. For thirty
years they have kept me in business, kept groceries in the pantry and most of
the bill collectors away from my door.
I have made a point to be honest in all my dealings with
them, to give them more value than they expect in my products and services, to
treat them like extended family, only better.
For all that time, I made sure not to bother them more than
necessary. A picture postcard now and then, or a long-winded, jocular e-mail
once or twice a year, and then only when I had something worthwhile to say,
like ‘I’ve finished a new drawing, or ‘We’re trying to publish a book’, or
‘Happy Holidays – Thanks for being a loyal DS Art customer’.
I’m
not complaining. Really, I’m not.
Effective as postcards are (pictures being worth at least a
thousand words, even in this economy), they are not without cost, especially when you start printing
them up into the thousands, which we are obliged to do these days. Add, then,
the price of postage, and the focused time it takes at home in front of the TV
to affix address labels and stamps, and something that used to cost pocket
money and an evening or two now takes more than a week and serious budgetary
consideration.
No, I’m not complaining. Really, I’m not.
I’m just reporting the reality that comes from having a
whole bunch of people turn from complete strangers to friends to extended
family over a relatively short period of time. We’ve had some busy years
lately, and the business is growing. Fast. Getting the word out for a reunion
becomes a strategic effort.
The
writing was on the wall.
It
was time to grow up and act like a real company.
Why not use e-mail? Well, we do. Or we did, until our
internet provider decided to limit the number outgoing messages we could send per
hour, and put a complete cap on how many we are allowed per week. We are
obliged to bundle our Friends list into bite-sized, anonymous groups and send
each bundle separately, and even then we began setting off SPAM alerts by the
mail stream monitorbots.
Things aren't like they were in the old days, Gilligan.
The writing was on the wall. It was time to grow up and act
like a real company, so we decided to embrace the next level of Internet communications
technology, and sign up for a MailChimp account.
MailChimp would let us communicate quickly and easily with
our growing list of DS Art Friends, avoiding all the limitations of our regular
e-mail service. It would give us new tools to keep our art fans up to date with
the many new and exciting projects we are working on, and would show everyone
that we are keeping up, or trying to, anyway, with technological advancements.
But maybe it worked too well.
With this one move has come, apparently, the unsettling
belief that the DS Art Studio is now a large and bustling enterprise. To be
sure, we bustle, especially during the holiday season, but the company is as
big as it has always been: It’s just me and the Missus.
Why do I say this? Because the response we have been getting
from our MailChimp newsletters has been, well, surprising. The kind of
reactions we would expect to get if we were a big, cold, impersonal company.
First, we noticed that only about a third of our new, fancy
newsletters actually got opened. (MailChimp sends us nice charts and graphs
telling us how many people receive our messages, and how many folks click
through to the web links we’ve included in the stories and pictures. It’s
pretty cool stuff.) One third is a lot
less than we expected – much less than the response we were used to getting from
our regular e-mail messages.
Second, We found out pretty quickly that a lot of our
customers don't want to be bothered with an official-looking newsletter. A lot
of folks thought it was just plain SPAM. And they didn't tell us – they told
MailChimp.
These
people weren’t strangers.
Many
were long-time customers
While we have always offered an ‘Unsubscribe’ option (and we
have always taken those requests to heart) we never had more than one or two
people reply to opt out after any mailing. After our first fancy, professional
newsletter, however, we had nearly two dozen customers head for the exit, only
to be followed by another dozen with each successive mailing.
These people weren’t strangers. Many were longtime
customers. Something about the new format has rubbed a raw nerve. Perhaps they
believe we’ve become something we’re not, something we’ve never been. Or
perhaps they felt comfortable telling MailChimp something that they didn't feel
like telling us directly.
Or maybe the rapid development of new and exciting projects
(well, exciting for us, anyway) over the summer months was more nuisance than
news.
Needless to say, the mass exodus got our attention. The
question now is, what do we do about it?
Should we limit our newsletters to two or three times a
year?
Should we drop the Chimp entirely and send individual
e-mails, maybe with one of those commercial software packages that makes it
look like every message is intimate and personal?
Should we just go back to using postcards?
Suffice it to say, if our newsletters are a bother, we’re awfully
sorry for the intrusion. Just tell us, and we’ll take your name off the list. Right
away. Honest.
But if there is anything we can do (or stop doing) that will
keep you on board, we’d like to hear about that, too.
Don
dsart@bellsouth.net
No comments:
Post a Comment