March 2017
Maximize Your Email Marketing By Jason Holladay

As your customers are inundated with emails, find out what elements you should include.

Knowing what components to include in your next email campaign can be tricky, especially if you don’t yet have much data to indicate what content your customers and subscribers want.

On the one hand, you want to offer exclusive, high-quality content they can’t find anywhere else, so they learn to trust you and want to engage with you.

At the same time, your emails need to drive traffic to your garden center and ultimately create sales to support your business.

It’s a delicate balancing act. If you’re unsure what to include in your email campaign, follow these guidelines until you have collected enough data to decide if you should do something differently.

If your goal is to build loyalty, trust and engagement:

Exclusive, high-quality, super useful content is the way to go. Include articles, tips and tutorials that directly help subscribers ease their most pressing pains and solve their biggest problems.

Tell success stories and anecdotes to connect with your customers on an emotional level and show them what’s possible.

Share special news you’ve discovered or deals you are offering just for them.

Use questions, polls and surveys to get valuable feedback.

These elements of your email campaign help customers get to know and like you, encourage them to trust you and prompt them to engage with you.

If your goal is to send traffic to your website:

For this goal, you need to add links to the amazing content that builds trust and engagement.

Include articles and tips that link to relevant pages on your website, such as products, gardening tutorials, videos, pest and disease identification or instructions.

You could also include summaries of recent blog posts with links to the full articles or include a calendar element with links to each event that you’re hosting at the store.

Individual email blasts separate from your email campaign can also effectively drive traffic to your website.

The trick is to clearly convey the value of clicking each link. Be careful not to overwhelm your subscribers with too many options.

If your goal is to increase sales:

High-quality, relevant content that builds trust and engagement is still very important for this goal, but it might take different forms.

In addition to articles, tips or tutorials that truly help your subscribers, consider including customer spotlights and success stories, which show customers what’s possible and illustrate how your products or services are helping other gardeners.

Testimonials provide concrete proof of either your company’s trustworthiness or the usefulness of a particular product.

Don’t forget coupons, sales, special deals and other promotions, but don’t overdo any of these elements either.


Catch Jason Holladay and numerous other speakers at the Independent Retailer Conference events throughout the year.

As a retailer, it’s often hard to leave your business environment for any reason. After all, being at your store helps create the personality of your brand while also keeping your business operations alive and thriving.

Then again, getting away from your store is often the recipe for success that all retailers need to keep their stores relevant in a competitive retail environment.

Attending trade shows is a great excuse for this, but do you know what makes a trade show even more exciting? When they offer leading retail education that helps you bring insight, ideas and more back to your stores.

The Independent Retailer Conference delivers exactly this and more for attendees of each of their conferences throughout the year.

Held bi-annually at ASD Market Week, the Independent Retailer Conference is a unique learning environment that is held directly on the trade show floors of ASD and delivers education-rich, action-packed learning experiences.

Attendees of ASD Market Week are invited to attend more than 50 educational sessions over the course of four days, helping them become better educated and more inspired in an effort to help their businesses thrive.

Learn more about the Independent Retailer Conference, upcoming speakers, future show dates and more at www.indieretailerconference.com.



Jason Holladay

Jason Holladay is an email marketing specialist at Email Contact. He can be reached at [email protected].