Marketing your email service, the old fashioned way

April 29, 2010

Meet MailBox Design. They're a new graphic design business with roots in educational publishing, based in Buckinghamshire, UK. Last week, we were chuffed to receive from them a brochure showcasing their snazzy Campaign Monitor rebrand - not only because it was so, well, educational, but a great example of how you can promote your email marketing service, too!

If you're looking for marketing inspiration, or simply want insight into how to start offering email to your clients, read on.

It's in the mail...

"We selected Campaign Monitor as it is the best fit for what we are trying to achieve in this area, and we love the product."

We commonly get asked to provide examples of reseller collateral such as executive summaries and slide decks. The great news is that these aren't that far off, however in the meantime, we'd like to share Mailbox Design's brochure as inspiration for your own marketing campaigns. Not only does it provide a concise summary of what a rebranded Campaign Monitor account has to offer, but also provides some very compelling reasons why email totally blows other sales and marketing channels out of the water. In short, the kind of stuff your new clients really want to see. Take a look at their brochure. (400kb, PDF)

Which leads on to how we actually received the brochure - in a handwritten envelope, via the good old-fashioned postal service.

Marketing, when you have a subscriber list of zero

"Many of our regional business link organizations organize meetings - we will be handing them out to anybody that attends, nobody will be safe!"

After having a bit of a giggle about emailers sending paper mail to emailers, we got in touch with Stephen DeBanks at MailBox to find out more about his marketing efforts. Thankfully he saw the irony in it too, however it did highlight the difficulty in kicking off a business with an email marketing campaign, when your client base (and subscriber list) is effectively zero. Even with existing customers in tow, there's always the issue of permission - unless your customers actively opt-in for your newsletters, of course.

So, what do you do when you're an emailer, with no-one to email?

Stephen's answer was to kick off a grassroots campaign, distributing this brochure via the mail, amongst local businesses, at product demos and at meetings. For specific companies, he hit the telephone, too. This solved the problem of not having permission to get in touch with contacts via email... And probably provided a great opportunity to legitimately sign people up for MailBox Design's newsletter.

In the future, Stephen hopes to pitch MailBox Design at industry events - and this brochure is a great way to give his message a lasting impact.

Stephen noted that both time and money were both factors, especially when distributing the brochures by mail. He made the most of the latter by adding a personal touch - hand-written, brown-paper envelopes - to affirm that it wasn't simply a mass mailout to anyone that would listen. Also, there's the element of surprise - no-one expects to receive a note from an email marketing company via the post!

Many thanks to Stephen at MailBox Design for sharing his story with us. To get some ideas for your next awareness campaign, take a look at their brochure (400kb, PDF) - We hope it will inspire you to either offer email marketing to your clients, or consider an alternative way to let the world know about your service! Alternately, find out more about rebranding Campaign Monitor - it's free and easy to get started with.

Have you rebranded Campaign Monitor? We'd love to know some of the great ways you have promoted your service - let us know in the comments below!

Posted in: Tips & Resources

8 Comments

KaiserSoze
April 30, 2010 9:59am

Sorry, this falls below the standards you guys set. For a company with impeccable design taste and excellent execution, profiling this site/company/brochure/whatever is an embarrassment. Not every rebranding of Campaign Monitor deserves even an honorable mention.

I apologize in advance, but I’ve been drinking IPAs and they’re like twice the alcohol of regular old Fosters! This brochure is craptastic.
Mathew Patterson
April 30, 2010 10:12am

Hey,

We appreciate the comment, but do you care to give a little more constructive feedback? We see a lot of ‘well designed’ rebrands which we don’t feature because they are doing much the same thing as other options, so this was a chance to show someone doing something different.
JC
April 30, 2010 12:28pm

the site design is pretty how-you-going
but the brochure i think was very well done :)
not all about design
Kirsten
April 30, 2010 4:01pm

Their website design is TERRIBLE! The brochure design is ok but their information architecture is fantastic. clear and simple. To bad they don’t have design to match.
Rory
April 30, 2010 7:22pm

I have to agree: the campaign concept is excellent and innovative, but the brochure itself is flawed on two counts – maybe three.
1. The inside spread is very busy. It looks like a lot of stuff to read, there’s too much visual distraction and no clear path for the eye. There isn’t an ounce of white space and the margins are very tight. All of this is a major problem for a firm selling graphic design.
2. The writing in the brochure is clumsy and contains a number of grammatical errors. For example
“If you are new to HTML designed
newsletters and email, we can do
this for you, all accounts come with a
range of fully tested editable templates
loaded, then using our online editor to
change the content you are set. “
should be two sentences, with a period before “all accounts.” This basic writing error is repeated numerous times throughout the piece. One assumes the company is to some extent selling copywriting services as well as design, so this too is a big deal.
3. (This last point may be the author of the article’s fault, not the company’s, but providing a PDF with the center spread as a single PDF page makes it a pain for the recipient to print. Acrobat’s default settings will shrink the spread down to a single page, at which point it will be very hard to read. Much better to create a 4-page PDF and set the file to open in two-page layout with cover page.

One last suggestion on design – in a brochure, especially, we find it helpful to show HTML emails with email client “chrome” around them. This helps people quickly recognize that they are examples of emails, rather than printed pieces.

Having said all that, starting a new business is a big step, and this is a creative way to build a customer list. The above is intended as constructive criticism.
JW
May 1, 2010 1:27am

I spent nearly $10,000 USD on marketing my “email marketing services” last year via direct mail markitng, and after depleting nearly half of that (about $4,000), I have absolutely no client’s to show for it.

After multiple phone calls from several “interested parties”, I was quickly realizing that there is virtually no market for marking up email marketing services, even at cost Campaign Monitor is far more expensive than it’s competitors.

Despite having a vast background in email marketing for some of the world’s fastest growing brands, and being involved with DOUBLING the email marketing revenue of one particular world-reknowned brand in merely 12 months time. Surprisingly no one is willing to pay such an exorbitant amount of money for email marketing, despite how fantastic the product may be, even the cost of $5/campaign + .01¢ / recipient is steep in comparison to what the competition offers.

In short be mindful of the money you spend on marketing any such services, heed my advice, learn from my mistakes, and do not rely on any such resellable tool, for any source of revenue. Your best chance is to offer it as a loss-leader “add-on service” to a website design project, and hope to make up the cost/hassle with selling the email marketing campaigns.
Mathew Patterson
May 1, 2010 1:44pm

@JW

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Certainly lots of people do use Campaign Monitor as an add on to their other services.

On the other hand “here is virtually no market for marking up email marketing services” is a huge generalisation - every month we are paying big amounts in markup profits to tons of designers, many of them charging quite a lot above our base rates.

Check out http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2763/1million-in-mark-up-paid-to-designers/ for some numbers.

So it probably depends a lot on the kinds of clients you work with, and how the services are sold. The people who make the real money are offering more than just ‘another email service’ - businesses are happy to pay more if they get more value back.
Paul Mycroft
June 6, 2010 2:50am

With our recent rebrand at Market 2 All, I like the idea of a mail-out first then a follow-up. We also use Facebook and our main email newsletter at http://www.paulmycroft.com to spread the word and generate permission-based signups.

We’ll be adding a newsletter and a blog to our site to give more value back to our visitors. And will be holding a seminar to local businesses on email marketing.

We have 15 clients, all of who find our service effective and affordable.

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