Case Study 1- Dave's Discs

Dave, a record store manager, has 150 regular customers, in addition to hundreds of casual customers, who frequent his store. Dave understands that by sending these customers news of his current offers and new CDs and 12"s, he can bring them into the store more often.

Dave decides to start collecting email addresses from his customers. He enters these into his Outlook software and, by the end of the third week has 50 addresses.

He writes his first email one Thursday evening, and carefully selects his recipients from his address book. Selecting 50 people out of the 250 contacts takes Dave around 10 minutes, and he is not sure if he included everybody.

He sends the email to his subscribers, who all enjoy reading his reviews, and as he expects, the next day, 6 of the people on the list are in the store to snap up some of his remaining limited edition CDs.

They also each enjoy reading the email addresses of the other 49 subscribers to Dave's mailing list. One of the subscribers also runs a record store in a nearby town, unknown to Dave, and he steals Dave's email addresses into his own database!

Dave likes this extra trade, and the following week, Dave collects another 76 email addresses from customers who buy records in his store.

That weekend he doesn't have the chance to enter the email addresses, but sends another email to his subscribers. He adds the 76 subscribers, and writes his mailshot. He gets another great response.

By the time Dave reaches 400 customers, he realizes that removing people who no longer wish to receive his mailshots is very difficult. Also, adding the recipients in Outlook is extremely time consuming.

So, Dave has found the power of Email Marketing, but his technique is very awkward to manage. How can we improve on this?

Case Study 2 - Vince's Vinyl

Vince owns a record store, like Dave.

Vince recently opened a Email Engine account.

He also included a simple form on his website which allows his website visitors to automatically register for his weekly mailshot. In addition to manually adding new customers who enter the store, Vince logs on each day to his Email Engine account, and checks how many new people have added themselves to his list.

When Vince sends an email with Email Engine, he simply types the email. He does not have to worry about including everybody from his Outlook address book, because everybody in his Email Engine database wants his information.

When the occasional subscribers does not want to receive this any more, they click a simple link at the foot of every email. They are automatically removed from the database as they wish, and Vince needs do nothing at all.