Focused Email Marketing in EPOS system

Email marketing is a powerful sale for increasing sales. By capturing email address either in your shop or on your ecommerce website, you can use sales history to build groups of customers to market with very focused emails.

One of the basic functions of any EPOS system is to collect email addresses from customers and record them at point of sale. These email addresses are extremely valuable assets, and you shouldn't waste them by sending our poorly considered email marketing campaigns.

Simply making one large email about all your products and sending it out to tens of thousands of customers' email addresses once a month is no longer good enough. Such campaigns have very poor conversion rates, and is squandering the information you've got in the EPOS system.

The EPOS system will have a large database of customers, and it will also know what various customers have purchased. Therefore you can design email campaigns for small groups of customers which those customers will really appreciate. As time goes by you can easily build up an EPOS database with thousands of email addresses, all complete with a sales history.

For example, I recently organised an email marketing campaign for a customer of mine who has about 50,000 email addresses stored in his EPOS database along with complete sales history. Using tools in the EPOS system we generated a list of all those customers who'd purchased only a certain product range with a particular brand. He negotiated with his suppliers to fund the creation of a template and a special offer on just this range of products.

The list of customers was about 4000 email address long, and consisted only of those customers who'd bought the products from this brand. The email was designed to market the special offer and sent out to just those customers.

The email generated about 2000 visits to the website, and something like 1000 additional sales, with zero unsubscribes. This is a very good result from an email marketing campaign, over 10 times the response you'd expect from a more general email marketing campaign.

The products in the special offer we were marketing were a consumable, so you might think the sales would even out over time, but this simply isn't a case. Creating a report soon told us that over a third of the sales generated by the email campaign were from customers who hadn't purchased from us in the last quarter. We had regained custom from older customers who haven't been shopping with us regularly, hopefully turning this into regular customers once more.

In this age of customer email marketing campaigns it is important to make sure any EPOS system stores all your retail and ecommerce customer email addresses in one common database with the sales history and that it allows you to generate email marketing lists based on very narrow criteria. Sending focused emails to these groups will create a much larger response than simply sending out the same email to everybody.