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01.23.08
Email And Blog Marketing Without A Budget
 By
Janet Meiners
With absolutely no money spent on advertising, Martin's (Peter Martin, CEO of AskPatty.com) email marketing strategy landed more than 200 dealership clients in one year. - MarketingSherpa
I'm a big fan of practical experience and reports to see what works in marketing. This case study by MarketingSherpa shows how a business used blogs and email marketing to reach their audience.
Women purchase 65% of the cars in this country and car dealerships are a hard sell. AskPatty.com is a site to give car-buying advice and information to women and at the same time market to car dealerships. They teach dealerships how to reach women and create custom websites and email newsletters targeted to women.
Here are some of the successes they had:
Get Media Attention - PR
They used their blog to get attention with the media and leveraged that attention to build an email list. When the articles came out they used the information in their email campaigns. Essentially they let the media do the research (come up with the content). Their blog had a mission - to help women have a better car-buying experience.
There aren't specifics on how they got media attention, but they got 300 articles in just six months. That included media like: The New York Times, Fox News and NPR.
Collect Email Addresses
Create an email list - AskPatty collected email addresses for car dealerships and emailed them once a month. They mentioned news about the site, their services, and related information about women car buyers.
Establish Goals for an Email Campaign
The goals of the AskPatty emails were:
* Call Martin directly to schedule a demo
* Drive them to the site with links to media reports or research.
* Register for online demos of products and services
If people responded in any way they were added to another email list and they got up to 15 follow-up emails over 30 days. There are more details in the report on how they did this.
Typical open rates for email are low, but they got rates from 9.8% to 17% and get them even more leads.
This is an important point: "Our goal is to build a relationship with customers. Rather than really shooting in the dark, we're now using ongoing communication." How do you measure the quality of the relationship? The monthly rate of people who unsubscribe to their email list is consistently under 1%.
Comments
About the Author:
Janet Meiners always wanted to be a reporter but prefers the immediacy of blogging. Known as Newspapergrl, she has freelanced for newspapers, City Search, and business magazines. She reports on internet marketing and online trends.
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