Loading…
8
A bakery owner in Savannah showed me her email list on a napkin and now I'm rethinking everything I do
I run paid ads for a small furniture company and I've always thought email was dead. Old people stuff. I was in Savannah two weeks ago for a wedding and stopped at this little bakery near Forsyth Park. The owner, mid 50s, started chatting with me while I waited for a coffee. I mentioned I did marketing and she laughed and pulled a napkin out of her apron with 4,000 names on it. Just names and emails, one napkin, that was her whole list. She sends one email every Friday at 6am about whatever she baked that week. Her Tuesday mornings bring in around $1,800 from people replying to that Friday email preordering. I've been running $3k a month in Meta ads for a client and they barely clear that. I sat in my rental car after and just stared at the dashboard for a while. Has anyone here moved budget from paid social into email and actually seen it hold up over 6+ months? I want real numbers, not blog post numbers.
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
daniel5525d ago
Are you sure that bakery story is telling you what you think it's telling you? That woman spent years building a list of 4,000 locals who walked into her shop and liked her bread enough to hand over an email, so her Friday note lands on people who already know her, and a furniture company with an ad budget usually has no list like that to start with. Email only works off a warm crowd, and buying one costs money too, so moving your whole budget over just means you paid more for names that may not even open. Those replies and preorders don't happen because email is magic, they happen because the bakery sells something people want every week and it's easy to say yes to a loaf. Furniture is a once in a decade purchase, so how many Friday emails do you think it takes before someone finally buys a couch? Test it with a slice, not the whole budget, and don't kill the ads until that list proves it can carry the weight.
1