So far, we’ve looked at why we should be using email marketing, how to collect addresses and generating content, now we need to look at how to get your message out to your SCUBA customers.

Using Your Email Program

You may already have Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail or some other email program on your computer, so you could just use that, right? Wrong. You could use that – if you wanted to look like an amateur.

There are a few problems with trying to do it yourself:

1. Your design will not be consistent. The built in design tools rarely follow true HTML email guidelines, so your message will appear different across the many systems (not just the desktop programs, but GMail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, etc) that your subscribers may be using.
2. You will not be able to track your success. We always need to keep ROI in mind, so we need a tool that will tell us how many people received our email, how many opened it, what they clicked on, etc.
3. You will not be able to send easily. Most ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) use something called throttling. Throttling limits the number of emails you can send in a certain period of time. Most ISP’s don’t publish these numbers to discourage spamming. That makes for a lot of trial and error.
4. You will not be able to easily manage subscribes and unsubscribes. People will have to reply, you’ll have to mark them somehow and hope you don’t message them again.

Using An Email Service Provider (ESP)

ESP’s fix all of the aforementioned problems. The only possible downsides are a learning curve and expense. We all know the SCUBA industry is a little slow right now, so we’d like to avoid any unnecessary expenses.

Luckily for your SCUBA business, I’ve tested quite a few ESP’s including AWeber, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, MadMimi and MailChimp.

I <3 MailChimp

I use MailChimp and LOVE their service. Here are a few of my main reasons:

1. Their Forever Free plan allows you to have up to 500 people on your list for…you guessed it: Free. Most SCUBA stores won’t need more than that.
2. They’re funny people. Humor is scattered around the site everywhere. I can appreciate that.
3. TONS of design options. They can mimic your site, they have basic templates you can customize, professionally designed templates or basic yet eye-appealing templates. Options are always good.
4. Their email marketing system is easy to use. It’s all wizard-based so you just follow the steps. If you need help, they have great instructional videos at every step of the process.
5. You can use existing lists as long as you captured the email addresses legitimately. Other providers won’t let you use lists unless they are built using their systems.

There are tons of advanced features in their email marketing platform we’ll discuss later.

Sign Up Now

Go get your free account, try it out. I’ll be giving some getting started pointers soon, but you’ll need an account to try them.

About the MailChimp links: in the name of full disclosure, the links to MailChimp are affiliate links. If you use the Forever Free plan, which I expect most SCUBA businesses to use, I get nothing. So, affiliate yes, retirement no If you think I’m recommending them because of their affiliate program, you’d be mistaken. All of the other providers offer real cash money affiliate incentives, MailChimp doesn’t.

Photo via Mzelle Biscotte

Email marketing is incredibly powerful and, now that you know how to collect email addresses, it’s time to generate some content. Generating content for your newsletter should be the easiest part of this process.

Your SCUBA Business is Busy

I don’t care what you may think about the economy, your business (as long as you’re running a real SCUBA business) is busy. You’re teaching classes, getting new equipment and going on dive trips. This is all content for your newsletter.

Give ‘Em What They Want

Your email newsletter subscribers gave you their address because they want to hear from you! So tell them everything going on with your SCUBA business. Independent SCUBA instructors, stores and dive resorts can all do this!

Tip for the Independent SCUBA Instructors

If you are an independent instructor and don’t have as much activity as a store, another great place to get content is from the Internet. Share articles you find interesting. This creates a personal connection between you and your students.

A great place to start is by subscribing to our list of SCUBA blogs.

Content Length

I haven’t seen any real scientific studies discussing the perfect length of your emails, but I like to keep mine short – no more than 2 pages when printed, preferably 1. People have short attention spans and are inundated with email, so being brief works to your advantage.

I also strongly recommend only sharing an intro to your content via email and linking out to the full article (preferably your blog). This not only keeps your emails even shorter, but it provides an excellent tracking opportunity we’ll discuss later.

I Can’t Write

If you can read, you can write. If you can operate a computer to read this article, you can hit the spell check button. That’s good enough for most people. If you really have a phobia of writing your own unique articles, use the method described above for independent instructors and just share information you find interesting.

What kinds of content do you share in your email newsletter?

Photo via churl

Email marketing can be an incredibly powerful tool, but some people see it as spam (even if done correctly) or incredibly difficult to begin. As we saw last time, email marketing has an incredibly high return on investment and should not be avoided. Both independent SCUBA instructors and SCUBA stores should be actively collecting email addresses.

Collecting Emails

Your SCUBA store or instructor business should be collecting email addresses immediately and at all possible opportunities. While the US Federal CAN-SPAM Act is actually fairly vague and doesn’t do much to protect consumers, we should all still abide by a common sense stance on email marketing: If you would hate the email marketing message you receive, don’t send it yourself.

“Harvesting” email addresses is the main legal issue we’re looking at today for our SCUBA business emails. Using email addresses that you (or a paid list provider) have simply found instead of having been given is considered harvesting and is in violation of SPAM guidelines.

Independent SCUBA Instructor Email Address Collection

As an independent SCUBA instructor, I find it incredibly easy to collect email addresses. The PADI student record folder has a line for email addresses. Be sure to tell your students that you MAY email them about upcoming classes or promotions. This disclaimer makes it legal. Simple, huh?

SCUBA Store Email Address Collection

SCUBA stores have a variety of options to collect email addresses:

• Have your SCUBA instructors get them from students with the disclaimer that they’re going back to the store too.
• Place a sign up form on your checkout counter. Offer discounts, promotions or local diving news.
• Create a customer database to help your customers track their purchases, trips and maintenance. Get their email address to help keep them up to date.
• When doing outside events, offer contests if people leave their email address.

Online Email Address Collection

In case you hadn’t noticed, here at New SCUBA Marketing there are a variety of ways to subscribe to the email newsletter:

• The link to the right.
• On the Facebook Page.
• For new or search visitors, there’s a popup.
• Contests.

EVERYWHERE

Give your students and customers the opportunity to give you their email address as many ways possible.

How have you built your SCUBA email subscriber list?

Photo via KirrilyRobert

Twitter, Facebook and Buzz are the talk of the town, but if you aren’t connecting with your SCUBA customers via email marketing, you are missing one of the most lucrative opportunities available to your SCUBA business.

The Statistics Behind Email Marketing

According to the Direct Marketing Association, Return on Investment (ROI) of email marketing was $43.62 per dollar spent in 2009. The next highest ROI came from Internet search advertising at only $21.85 per dollar spent.

Furthermore, Merkle found that Social Networkers actually use email MORE than their non-social networking counterparts. 42% of respondents who use social networks check their email 4 or more times a day. The great news is 63% of those users use the same email for their social network notification as they do their permission-based email newsletters.

Over the coming weeks, I will discuss how to build your subscriber list, what tools to use to distribute your email newsletters to your SCUBA customers and ideas for generating content.

Are you using an email newsletter? How is it working for you?

Image via Yandle

According to a study by Forrester Consulting, “Only 32 percent of marketers know how customers behave across channels and only 37 percent know what channels their customers prefer to use.” Some other interesting tidbits from the study:

• 92% of online consumers have opted-in for email marketing, making it the most popular channel for permission-based promotional messages across every age group
  Do you have a SCUBA email marketing program?
• 70% of consumers who visit Facebook at least once a month are a “fan” of at least one company/brand
  Have you setup a SCUBA Facebook page for your SCUBA diving business?
• They also say they have never given a company permission to send them information through a social network
• Marketers should use social media to listen and engage with customers, not to market to them
  The typical SCUBA diver doesn’t want to be spammed, they want to contact you for their SCUBA diving needs

“The bottom line is that in an industry where new digital communications make it easier to send a variety of messages, it’s imperative that marketers not only send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, but that they use the right channel as well,” said Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy.

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SCUBA Diving and Marketing Lessons

I believe it was at a PADI member forum when I saw a training video demonstrating an in-pool SCUBA diving accident. One of the SCUBA students was obviously (to us in class) flustered and afraid of going underwater. Due to the flood of data the SCUBA instructor had to take in (the other students, weather, gear issues, etc), the nervous SCUBA diver wasn’t noticed, and there was a problem.

Similarly, if you let all of the marketing choices and issues in life come at you without paying attention to the people you are trying to serve, you could be working very inefficiently. We, as SCUBA marketing professionals, need to pay better attention to our SCUBA diving customers to provide excellent customer service to build our SCUBA business and retain customers.

Email Marketing for SCUBA Diving

I’m going to discuss both the technical aspects of email marketing as well as strategy, but for now I just want to point you to my favorite tool for email marketing. They have a free option that allows you to have up to 500 people on your SCUBA email list, plenty for those of you just starting out.  The company is MailChimp and they offer a huge variety of options in their email campaigns. So I encourage you to at least go take a look and register for a free account, the lessons will be coming soon.

If you want to see an example, feel free to sign up for my weekly RSS feed-based emails. They are completely automated, which is very handy in our busy lives.

How are you using email marketing for your SCUBA diving business?

In order to email someone, one of the key components you must have is their email address. There are a variety of ways to obtain email addresses, some right, some very wrong, so I’ll go over how to build your email list.  I consider this one of the first steps before starting any design or content work, since those will just sit doing nothing until you have a list to contact.

SPAM and You

According to the Federal CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, you actually can purchase email lists. I really do not recommend this for a few reasons:

1. People don’t like unsolicited email, which will help you to build a very negative reputation.
2. Most email marketing systems will not allow you to use purchased lists, so it will most likely be a waste of money.
3. It’s really easy to build your SCUBA email marketing list, so why suffer from #1 and #2?

So what does the Federal CAN-SPAM Act say? Basically, you have to send from a valid email address and provide legitimate unsubscribe options, both of which are basic features of any email marketing software.

List Building the Right Way

Email is primarily a tool to stay in touch with previous customers – your SCUBA students, dive shop customers or resort visitors.  If you’ve been collecting email addresses all along, you’re in luck. If you haven’t been, I’ll give you some ideas for how to easily start collecting them and how to get them based on whatever information you have collected in the past.

I Already Have a List!

Great! Your work is almost done. So we don’t come across as spammers, I suggest your first email (I’ll explain what system I recommend and how to use it soon) read something along these lines:

Due to your [participation in one of our classes/attendance at one of our events/recent purchase in our shop/recent stay at our resort], we would like to continue to share with you periodic promotional information.  We will be sending out a [weekly/monthly/quarterly] newsletter highlighting SCUBA information and events we think you may be interested in.  If, however, you are not interested in staying in touch, please feel free to use this link to unsubscribe immediately.  Thanks blah blah blah

By introducing your plans this way, you accomplish a few things:

1. You set realistic expectations. If they know you’re going to email once a month, they won’t complain about the frequency if you send it once a month.
2. You let them know why you’ll be contacting them. They may be a former student or customer and you just want to let them know about the wonderful world of diving.
3. You let them know they can quit easily. If they know who you are, why you’re contacting them and that they can make it stop if they ever need to, people are actually more likely to stay on your list.

I Have Nothing!

Have you ever had a student fill out a student record file? If so, you’re in luck! You at least have an address. I know PADI has a place for an email address as well, so hopefully you had your students include that. Type them into your database, send them the first email from above and away you go.

No, I Really Have Nothing

We can’t fix the past, but we can prepare for the future. Make sure you are stressing to your future students the importance of giving you their email address on their folder. Have customers in your shop or on your resort sign up for your mailing list.  Simple, deliverable promises of wanting to let them know when you are having specials on classes, gear or trips will get most people to willingly provide an email address.

Use Your Web Site

If you aren’t collecting email addresses on your web site, you are missing a great opportunity.  I’ll show you later how to create an easy form complete with automated responses to make your life even easier so you can completely capitalize on that.

Nick, Where’s Your Email List?

How quickly we forget, it’s the email icon over on the right side of the page near the top as mentioned in the article, SCUBA Marketing is Social.  If you hadn’t noticed, I tell you how often you can expect to hear from me, the general idea of the content I’ll be sharing and what I intend on doing with your email address. This is one of the great things about email marketing and SCUBA blogs, you can tie to two together to stay in touch with your customers automagically.

Even if you’re not ready to start emailing your customers, start collecting email addresses now so your life is easier in the future.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me, but the results of the recent survey had email marketing as the number one most requested topic by a decent margin. I was surprised not because I don’t think it’s insanely valuable (it wouldn’t have been on the list if I didn’t), but because most people I run into shy away from it because they don’t want to be considered spammers.

Online Marketing Motto

You’ll see me saying this on most of our topics:

Setup is a pain, but once it’s in place it’s easy

This definitely applies to email marketing as well.  Since it’s such a large topic, I’m going to break it down into easy to digest pieces.  First, an explanation of why everyone in the SCUBA industry should be using email marketing.

Email vs. Direct Mail

A few people responded asking about using direct mail. In my years of experience dealing with a direct mail happy industry, direct mail is used ONLY for marketing to a certain geographic area when you have no other options available.  The United States Postal Service has even begun discussions to deliver one less day a week because volume has decreased.  Direct mail is on the way out.  I will share some direct mail ideas, but I firmly believe email is far more effective.

Email & The Environment

Even if you don’t consider yourself a tree-hugger, the SCUBA industry is tied directly to the environment. If our reef’s die, our resorts go with it. If pollution hits our lakes and rivers, our SCUBA classes have to travel farther away. If air quality gets so bad, our dive shops have to increase filtration for tank filling.  You get the idea.

The Business of Email

According to a 2009 Epsilon Data Management Branding Survey, 57% of respondents view a company who markets to them via email more favorably and with greater loyalty.  For those of you who are just thinking “I already get too much spam, I couldn’t do that to my customers”, that same study shows that 84% of respondents said they like getting the emails even if they don’t read them.

According to a Direct Marketing Association in 2008, email marketing had a $45.06 return on investment (ROI) compared to only $19.94 for internet marketing and $15.55 for direct mail. So you get far more bang for your buck.

For those of you who are thinking of skipping email and going direct to text messaging, be careful. Not only do text messages cost your customers money, according to the ExactTarget 2008 Channel Preference Survey, only 9% of consumers prefer text over email for marketing.

Marketing Research

Now for those of you who like to simply throw your money out the window and just hope it makes its way back, I’ll be setting up a payment page soon…just kidding.  If you like to try to track your marketing dollars and fine tune your campaigns, email is one of the best tools.  I’ll be teaching you how to use an incredible tool that is very cost effective that will allow you to see who opened your email, how many times, what they clicked on and much more. Plus, list management is handled for you and your campaigns will help to build your brand.

Isn’t Email Free?

People always flinch when I say “cost effective” since they think email is free.  Two points on this one:

1. Your email address is your brand.  If you send me  an email and your address is awesomediver@yahoo.com, it doesn’t convey a sense of professionalism like nick@nicksdivingcenter.com or coursedirector@localdiveshop.com.  If Bank of America sent you an email where the address was bankofamerica@hotmail.com, would you trust it? So I’ll teach you how to get a custom email address too.
2. You can not use Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook or any other basic email tool to market successfully.  They can not keep your design consistent for your recipients which may destroy your branding.  They can not track the success of your campaigns. They can not manage subscribes and unsubscribes for you.  They can not automatically pull your articles of your new SCUBA blog and send them automatically to your list members, hitting both new search engine traffic and existing customers with one effort.

If you didn’t vote for email marketing before, hopefully I’ve sparked an interest since it can be one of your most powerful tools for customer retention.