Midwest Drycleaning & Laundry Institute www.MWDLI.org / 765-969-5745 10 Forget Fridays In general, the majority of your readers will be thinking about the weekend and overcoming any obstacles they may face before lighting out of the office. For that matter, don’t bother sending during the weekend since your readers are less likely to bother checking it during their days off – even on their telephones. Mondays – not so good Coming back from the weekend means sifting through piles of junk to see what you may have missed late Friday – more so if you took a vacation day Friday. This means people are in a hurry going through an abundance of junk mail and your message is likely to get skipped and buried. DLI got around this by actually creating a new series to be sent only on Mondays that contains zero sales pitches and only the occasional product mention. Conventional wisdom says fewer people check their e- mail often on weekends. Since many people keep an e- mail inbox open all day for their work they are more likely to see your message if it comes in during business hours. Of course there are exceptions to these rules of thumb and as society continues to change so will the conventional wisdom. The Motivational Power of a Deadline Inertia applies to human psychology as it does in physics: once at rest, they tend to stay at rest unless acted upon by some force. That force is the deadline in your message. Don’t give them too much time to think or talk themselves out of acting on your call to action. Many items have been purchased that would not have without a strong incentive and a firm deadline to back it up. Also: the more exclusive the offer seems the more likely it is to be accepted. For example, “Since you are one of our most frequent customers, we’d like to say thanks with a special offer,” would work well on the top 20% of a drycleaner’s most frequent fliers. In this case it might be best to consider not offering a discount on what they would have given you anyway but an offer to clean something they don’t normally bring for free. If your records say comforters are down, such an offer could include 25% off bed sets or something similar. Closing the Deal Marketing e-mails can prove to be extremely effective if they get the right message to the right people. At the very least the message will be seen to be coming from your company. Even if the message is deleted instantly, you have touched that customer. Providing links to gateways to something of value to the prospective customer can help you create a list of warm leads for a follow-up offer. We Find Funds. We Clean Up. You Stay Open.® We’re a full-service environmental consulting firm that has cleaned up more dry cleaning sites than any other firm in the USA. We’re the only firm that focuses on finding the money to pay for investigation, cleanup, and legal defense. We restore the value of your property while protecting you from regulatory and legal issues. 866.888.7911 enviroforensics.com Stop by our Clean Show booth #4664