29th June 2016

Email outreach to get wholesale buyers on board

The food wholesale sector is undergoing some big changes at a rapidly increasing rate. Therefore, to ensure that customers are not lost during these tumultuous times, wholesalers are communicating said changes to the purchase structure as a priority.

24 hour fulfilment is now the standard, and quicker, more efficient online ordering processes are being implemented all the time. Convenience-style shopping is, according to a number of retailers, on the rise, which means that wholesalers are having to deliver to customers who have smaller storage space, but a higher daily demand for stock.

If your buyers are in the dark about changes to the food wholesale purchase structure, you run the very real risk of losing them to a competitor. Buyers are busy people, who have multiple operations to run, so there’s no guarantee that they’ll return to you if another wholesaler beats you to the mark with messages of improved service and revolutionary new structures.

So to protect your profits and ensure repeat custom, it’s essential that you communicate changes in the wholesale market, and establish a way to engage your buyers with your specific brand. A great way to reach out to your customer base is through email. Email is ideal because it’s quick to format and send, reaches large numbers of relevant contacts and is measurable post-sending with analytics and follow-ups. With email, you target your message only to those who matter.

According to The Radicati Group, the average businessperson receives an eye-watering 91 emails a day, with this set to rise to 95 over the coming year. Now, that’s a lot of email. So how on earth do you cut through this mass of content, and reach out to your buyers in a meaningful way? How do you make sure that your message of purchase structure change is heard, and responded to?

Firstly, you have to define your goal. For food wholesalers, this is building awareness of changes to purchase structure and engaging your buyer community. You may also like to cater your message more specifically, and send only to a select few contacts of whom this applies to.

Secondly, identify your target database. This will, of course, comprise largely of your existing customer base, but it wouldn’t hurt to mine some good industry databases for potential new clients to target.

Now, you make your email content all about the contact. Research in this area has found that including a reference to the contact in the subject line increases the likelihood of an open. Include a clear call to action, which will serve as your value proposition, and ensure that it communicates a benefit to the contact or addresses their currently situation directly. Another great tip is to integrate plenty of external links to your business. This not only drives traffic to your website, where more information can be published and conversion can occur, but also allows for deeper analytics (click-throughs, purchase info etc). Via your email campaign provider, you can see what works best and discern what interests your contacts most.

Before you send, think about how your email fits into your contact’s inbox. Studies have revealed that email open rates are best between 8:30am and 1pm or at the end of the day when people are preparing to leave work, whilst “spammy” subject lines are generally linked with low open rates. Communicate a sense of urgency, but keep it simple. Describe the content of your email well, reference the contact, and you’re onto a winner.

Finally, don’t be afraid to resend. Research suggests that open rates double by the third email, but drop off from here on. Take a look at your stats and analytics and tweak the messaging in your resend as appropriate, or target only specific contacts. If it gets you to where you want to be, go for it. But remember, it’s third time lucky as they say!

Getting the right contacts, the right copy and the right analytics is time consuming. It’s also a specialist job, which often involves the input of a team of design, copy, lead generation and data specialists. If you’re serious about having your message generate the desired result, why not speak to us?

Bareface understands that technology has revolutionised the way your buyers consume information. So, we make it our mission to put digital at the heart of everything we do. We know exactly how to create user-centric content that drives commercial results and ups engagement. We create campaigns that effectively communicate messages in a fast-moving market, and our wholesale targeting is second to none.

 



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