Ben Bendall, Online Marketing Specialist, for Eclectic Bars, talks about how email is core to their online marketing strategy, how they ensure their emails get through to their readers - keep them interested and drive sales.

Eclectic Bars Ltd, comprises of 15 bars and clubs across the UK, each with its own unique personality. Their portfolio of brands including Po Na Na, Fez, Bondai, Embargo and Sakura. Each brand has a tailored market from rockers to clubbers and everything in between.

Eclectic have always managed their marketing in-house, and have been using Pure's PureResponse system for over 18 months to deliver emails to regular and prospective clientele.

Approximately 90% of Eclectic's marketing is done online, virtually eradicated print advertising for a more cost effective and measurable option.

Ben Bendall, Online Marketing Specialist for Eclectic Bars comments, "email marketing is a core source for ticket sales; it also drives traffic to our websites."

Ben liaises with each of the venues PR Managers to approve email content, managing production of emails for the venues and ensuring they are attention grabbing and on-brand.

Each of the venues has its own mailing lists, and tailored template design (click the image above to see the Sakura email template). Eclectic sends over 200,000 emails a month, segmenting deliveries to one email per week per venue to ensure their emails are welcomed and not treated as spam.

Segmenting your market

The majority of Eclectic's mailing lists are collected via sign up forms on their websites, where visitors can join the members club.

Visitors can select musical tastes which enables Eclectic to promote events of interest, as apposed to a 'catch all' scenario.

Furthering their refinement of lists, information is gathered on going out habits, regular gig goers, students, corporate clients or weekenders are all targeted specifically and increase the chance of not just open rates but goal conversions for ticket sales.

The email message

Eclectic keep communications friendly, involving readers in the Sakura or Po Na Na lifestyle. Emails provide links to photo galleries of nights passed, upcoming events, the opportunity to register for the guest list or VIP booths and to buy tickets for events. All of these personal touches engage with their visitors so that even when they're not in the venues, they are still with the group.

Directing online sales

For Eclectic, the most valuable function of using a professional email marketing service is the ability to drive & monitor click-throughs to online sales.Ben states, "Our emails both directly and indirectly drive sales through our websites."

Ensuring deliverability

"One of our major reasons for using PureResponse is the increase in deliverability to inboxes. It allows us to test and identify spam issues and then send our emails in both html and plain text. A number of our subscribers can only receive plain text, this is mainly the case with university email accounts, as the campuses have strict proxy servers in place. The student community can make up a large number of our mailing lists, so we need to ensure we reach them in an accessible manner."

Ben has learned about email marketing that "Sometimes less is more", email allows the company to promote their events in a simple and direct way to their student market without bombarding their subscribers.

"We maintain clean lists, each year we have a large number of students on our mailing list, finish their degrees and move away from the area, if they're using their university email addresses - they then become inactive. it's important to us to be aware of when this is happening, and to be able to clean out our lists, of non-existent recipients." This move means that the value of reporting is increased as the sending data is concentrated on addresses which exist.

Learning from the results

Ben comments, "The reporting section in PureResponse is fantastic, it allows us to check exactly who has received our emails & identify whether emails have bounced or been blocked. The opportunity to understand our results, and in some cases retarget the unopened sends successfully is really impressive."

"We also find the information on open rates and post-click-tracking invaluable. We use post-click-tracking to link each recipients transaction with an email campaign, allowing us to accurately measure return on investment for each campaign."

Further information:

• Eclectic Bars Ltd
• Sakura Lincoln