Simple Recipes – Email Campaigns and BBQ Sauce

by redembermarketing on March 28th, 2009

SIMPLE HOMEMADE BBQ SAUCE
1/2 Cup Ketchup
1/2 Cup Honey
1/2 Cup Finely chopped vidalia onion
1/4 Cup Cider or red wine vinegar
1/4 Cup Worchestershire sauce
1/4 Cup Prepared mustard

When it comes to recipes for email marketing, it’s helpful to take a cue from what most great chefs will tell you: “Master simple recipes with fresh ingredients first and only then try mixing in more sophisticated twists and turns.”

Before you go and attempt the marketing equivalent of trying to cook something off the menu of the French Laundry or slicing up some blowfish sashimi, why not tackle and master something basic?  Incredible returns can be gained by effectively executing some simple techniques – in the kitchen or at the office.

Let’s start with the kitchen and take BBQ sauce as an example (finally, some food-appropriate analogies for the blog!)  I often make my own, but depending on how much time I have, I use very different recipes (I have one recipe that has 25 ingredients on it!).

My son, happens to love dipping his chicken/pork/sweet potato fries/… okay he loves to dip everything, including his fingers and apparently, asparagus, in a little dish of sauce.  But he doesn’t need much to be happy.  When I make sauce for him, it consists of some ketchup, brown sugar, a little cider vinegar, liquid smoke, and a little onion powder.  Just 5 ingredients and you have something that rivals the corn syrup concoction that we all have in a plastic bottle on the door of our fridge.  It can be whipped together in 45 seconds, and based on the “mmm’s” and “wow’s” I get when he sees and tastes it, I’d say it’s mission accomplished.  Sometimes, the simpler, the better.

The same thing goes for your email campaigns.  Looking for an email marketing recipe that you can whip together fast with great results?  Segmentation is a simple ingredient you can focus on first and get some serious improvements in performance.  Could it be the Béchamel sauce of email?  Perhaps, but we’re talking BBQ here, right?  Let’s see, maybe it’s the vinegar, since most BBQ sauces usually use vinegar of one sort of another.  Ok, analogy-out-of-control.

It probably won’t take a long look at your inbox before you’ll agree that most emails out there are designed for the masses, but I bet you have some data that can be used to segment your database.  How about: Gender, purchasing history, purchasing frequency, industry, location, interests, etc.  At the very least, you should have some activity history from previous email campaigns.

Think historical email data is just for evaluating campaign performance? Get this: By segmenting their database based on email activity (active, passive, or inactive), AARP was able to re-engage passive or inactive subscribers and increase their active subscribers by 59% by targeting the right messaging to the right people.

So maybe you’re a BBQ purist and getting ready to write a comment explaining to me that real BBQ is the mustard or vinegar variety that are more common down south… well, I enjoy a Carolina pulled pork sandwich as much as the next guy, so I promise to post some simple recipes for those sauces next!

Image credits: MegaBBQ.com