The craze of social media is igniting companies to look for more ways to connect with their subscribers. Gone are the days of blasting only coupons and promotions. Now is the time to engage and connect with your subscriber base. Looking to interact and build a stronger relationship with their subscribers, the marketing team from Chick-fil-A decided to move away from the standard ‘restaurant’ type emails which focused solely on coupons and promotions. By following these 4 tactics, Chick-fil-A’s email program averages open rates around 30%, clickthrough rates around 15% and has quadrupled their Facebook fan base.

Here are the four steps they took to increase subscriber interaction,
plus 4 swell steps to take in your own Mail Dog account

Quality vs Quantity

First step was to create a clean, high-quality email list by consolidating all of their opt-in emails into one database and purging bad emails and repeat hard bounces. While this did reduce their list by 30%, it gave them a much higher quality list, which improved the accuracy of the backend reporting and helped to track the success of their new program.

SWELL DOG TIP
Using Mail Dog’s Super Bounce Logs you can easily locate, export and/or purge the bad emails and repeat bounces from your lists. Keeping a clean list not only improve the accuracy of your reporting stats, but also helps save some green by cutting down on undeliverable transmissions.

Broaden the Playing Field

Promotions and special offers are always an important element to a retail/restaurants email campaign, but the Chick-fil-A team decided to include informational and fun content to appeal to a wider range of interests. More call-to-actions were inserted including: find a store link, add-to-calendar link (for special events), and a forward to a friend link. For fun, Chick-fil-A would also include information like news about corporate sponsorships, the popular cow mascots website, upcoming events and more. This way, even if a subscriber was not interested in using the specific coupon they could still interact with the other elements in the newsletter.

SWELL DOG TIP
The Mail Dog templates come in many shapes and sizes. Try moving your single promotional email into a 10-feature template and incorporate few fun articles for your subscribers to connect with. Best part is once your content is inserted in the Wizard you can switch templates at any time to find one that works perfectly for your newsletter needs.

Find more Friends

One important new addition to the email design was a “Find us on Facebook” link prominently placed in each email. Along with a well-maintained Facebook page and links for subscribers to “share this network with friends,” the Chick-fil-A team grew their Facebook fans from 25,000 to 1 million in just one year. Sometimes it helps to ask and re-ask subscribers to join your social media network.

SWELL DOG TIP
Even if you don’t have a Facebook page today, you can still start networking. By adding Mail Dog Social Share tags into your newsletter you allow your subscribers to share your message with their social network. What better way to spread the news, then by having your best advocated (your subscribers) do the work for you.

Get Feedback

By sending an email survey to their subscribers the Chick-fil-A team got much needed insight into their re-vamped email changes. A few answers even shocked them…like most subscribers wanted to see more emails from Chick-fil-A (even more than 1 per week), 50% forward the emails to friends and 75% per of recipients visited a Chick-fil-A store as a result of seeing the email…wow!

SWELL DOG TIP
Even if you can’t get a full survey together, try adding a simple question to each email newsletter and see what types of response you get. You may never really know what your subscribers are feeling or thinking unless you ask them! Use Mail Dog’s survey form to achieve this nifty interactive technique.

With the thousands of emails sent everyday you have to find a way to impact and interact with your subscribers, find a way to engage the recipients who might not have a need to purchase from you or taken advantage of that specific promotion.

They may not be interested today, but as long as they can continue to relate and connect with your email communications one day they (or someone they know) might just take advantage of your email promotion.

“We wanted to make an email program that’s more of an experience – not just an announcement of a new product or whatever that week’s promotion is,” says Michael McCathren and his marketing team at Chick-fil-A.

Eat Mor Chickin:  www.eatmorchikin.com