By Kris Kumlien

In January of 2006 I took over a small retail fly fishing business and guide service in Bozeman, Montana that was struggling after years of neglect and mismanagement.

Sales had been on an 8 year decline, and the business was flat lining under new ownership with a lack of real direction.

The challenges we faced were much like those of a start up business, only we had to deal with less capital and more “baggage” from the years of negative customer experiences.

We decided that a new image and culture change was in order for our business and we needed to reach out to past customers while still attracting new ones. To do so we developed a marketing plan to become more customer-centric and focus on the needs of our local customer base while still reaching out to our out of state clientele.

Our business relies heavily on seasonal tourists coming to Montana to fish, but we felt that we first needed to improve our image locally in order to be attractive to travelers, and so we set about finding ways to market ourselves affordably.

Challenges

The biggest challenge we faced in getting our message out was the same as many small businesses – finding marketing that was affordable, results-driven and measurable.

For most small businesses the additional challenge comes with a very small marketing budget and today’s increasingly crowded advertising channels.

With the breadth of advertising mediums it is extremely arduous to stand out amongst the crowd and get your message heard. We thought briefly of mass mailing campaigns, or telephone conversations but decided both were too time consuming, too expensive, and would be difficult to really communicate our new message effectively.

Television and print advertising seemed expensive, and because of our need to reach both local and national markets, finding channels to spread the message to a national audience was way out of our budget.

Solutions

We were left with our website and our fledgling email list as avenues to pursue. At the time Email Marketing wasn’t new, but it was rare in our particular industry.

So we dipped our toes in by sending out a few emails to our existing customer list of about 75-100 from our own email contacts and used our own email server sending out some simple pictures and short messages.

At first the results weren’t overwhelming. We did hear from our customers that they enjoyed getting the emails.

The problem was we didn’t know how many people were reading the emails, and worse, we weren’t sure how many were even receiving the emails due to SPAM filters etc. That’s when we decided we needed a list serve to help us improve the management of our Email Marketing.

We checked with several large Email Marketing companies to send out our emails from, but they weren’t able to provide a cost effective solution for us in sending out emails to a couple hundred people. One of them suggested that we check out Constant Contact’s services for small businesses; we did, and it seemed like a perfect fit.

Instead of just throwing together a generic email and sending it out from our own email server, we were now going to be able to have someone else send out the emails, monitor the open rates and more effectively navigate the SPAM filters.

The cost was minimal, a monthly fee for unlimited emails that was based off of the size of our customer list, which was perfect for a small business wanting to send out multiple emails within a small time frame. A feature essential to monitoring the success of our emails was the readership rate – we could see how many people were opening the emails and what links within the emails they were clicking on.

Starting out everything wasn’t easy, because we had a very small list, and we weren’t professionals at web design or email template design.

We needed to expand our email list and improve the look of our emails and develop a plan for frequency and content in the emails.

We set up a newsletter signup on our website as well as a signup list in our storefront location to increase the number of customers on our list. Every time we attended an event or show anywhere we took along our email signup sheet and added people to our list.

Results

We were soon at over 600 users and we felt we had a winning formula in place to grow our list; today we have over 1800 people on our email list. The next step for us was to improve the look and content of our newsletters.

To start off we used a number of different templates from Constant Contact, trying out different formats and changing the look of our emails on a regular basis. We thought that creating a fresh look every time would keep customers excited and looking forward to the next newsletter.

Later on we would find out that wasn’t an industry best practice and so we had professionals design a template for us to work off of that was consistent with the look of our website – branding is key in designing E-Newsletters and consistency is at the top of the list in creating effective branding.

Much of what we learned about Email Marketing has come from the folks at Constant Contact who selected us as one of their Marketing Success Stories back in 2008. Following our selection in their advertising campaign, we were given access to Constant Contact’s marketing staff and they were essential in helping improve our digital marketing campaigns.

At the onset of our Email campaigns our main focus was to simply put as much information out there as possible. After consulting with professionals we developed a style that increased traffic to our website through the use of links in our newsletters.

Instead of having customers read everything in our newsletters, we drove traffic back to our BLOG and website, increasing exposure to products we sold online and increasing web traffic, which in turn drives improved search engine results.

Advice

It is essential that newsletters not only communicate information, but also deliver tangible results to your bottom line. We specifically market products in our newsletters and monitor the resulting uptick in sales – that way we know how effective our message really is.

Along the way we’ve learned many things through trial and error and customer feedback. Soliciting your customers’ feedback is essential in the early onset of Email Marketing. You have to develop a formula that works for your business and your customers.

By checking with your customers you can find out if people enjoy more content, or if they prefer shorter more poignant emails. We also found out that not all customers want to receive all emails – for instance, some people sign up specifically to get our fishing report updates while preferring not to receive information on our guided services.

So if we want to communicate a special we are running on our guided services we don’t include a portion of our list so that they aren’t being bombarded with emails that they are uninterested in.

We also learned that consistency is key. Make sure that you come up with a timetable of when you are going to send out emails and stick to it – monthly is good and if you have specific events then more frequent is fine.

It’s critical to understand that you aren’t the only company sending out newsletters, so keep your communications relevant. Send too many emails and you will likely offend your customers and instead of reading your content, they will simply delete your email without bothering to look to see what you are saying.

As a small business you can keep your message relevant by creating content your users are interested in, instead of blasting them with every sale that you run like many of the larger companies do. An important element in improving results of your digital marketing is to drive traffic back and forth through your website, Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure that in all of your communications you have links to your Social Media and website. The more you can increase traffic across all channels, the more easily you can make sure your message is making it through to customers from one avenue or another.

For instance, if you send out a newsletter and a customer misses the email, but sees a Facebook post or catches a Twitter feed or visits your website and finds the link, the better readership you are going to get and the more you get from your time putting the newsletter together.

Digital marketing has shifted from a portion of our marketing, to the main focus of our marketing efforts. It has truly satisfied our need for affordable, results-driven, and measurable marketing and it can for your business as well.

Summary

Thanks to Kris for taking time out of his busiest business period of the year to write this inspiring story. He certainly deserves some link love for his efforts so if you are interested in Fly Fishing head over to www.troutfitters.com and sign up to their newsletter or follow them on Twitter and Facebook to see how real people get real results .

We at the Digital Marketing Institute bring you inspiring stories like Kris’s to show you what is truly achievable with digital marketing. Kris with the help of some elbow grease and some trial and error turned around the fortunes of a business not traditionally associated with the online space.

With our training you can learn the skills necessary to take you to the next level and propel your business or career forward.

If you want to find out more about email marketing or any other type of digital marketing, I recommend taking one of our courses. For a general online marketing course see our professional diploma in digital marketing or for specific courses see our range of short courses.