During 2009, Mila Hardware undertook an extensive e-marketing campaign sending out regular e-shots to existing and potential customers and specifiers.

This was carried out in house and proved a very cost effective and successful way to communicate information about our new products and to generate enquiries.

As is fairly standard practice these days, each e-shot was monitored to see how many recipients opened it, how many clicked through to the relevant page of our website and how many responded by either requesting further information or ultimately placing an order.

In marketing terms, the open and response rates proved very interesting.  Of course, they helped us to evaluate which were our most popular products but more significantly perhaps, they helped us to analyse the words and messages which are most effective in targeting customers in the doors and windows market.

It probably won’t surprise many readers to hear that the highest open rate during the whole year was achieved by an e-shot headed up with the word ‘cheap’ – over 50% compared with our normal successful open rate of around 20%.  Ironically, it didn’t refer to the products which Mila was promoting but to the cheap window and door locks which had been condemned by a senior policeman in Yorkshire as being behind a surge in burglaries in his local area.

Mila was in fact promoting its Evolution high security window and door locks and using the police chief’s statements to give customers useful ammunition to use in their own marketing programmes attacking the cheap and ultimately useless solutions installed in some areas.

For a company like Mila which is making significant investments in product development, innovation and service, the challenge in our marketing is to overcome this industry’s instinctive drive towards the cheapest solution and to communicate the added value behind our products.

This challenge is of course the same as that faced by a great many fabricators and installers trying to sell a quality product at a fair price into a market dominated by cut price offerings.   However, if you take our 2009 e-shots as a snap shot of the window industry, we also received good open rates on products headed innovative, new or value which gives a clear indication of customers’ other major concerns.

During 2009, I think we were particularly successful in communicating our added value and some of our best selling products were not our cheapest ranges but those which had been designed and developed in house and which featured either design or fabrication solutions which made them either easier to sell or easier to fit.

We even provide downloadable marketing support material to help customers to communicate these benefits.

As we move into 2010, we will be continuing with our e-marketing campaign and launching our first e-newsletter which will include product previews for all of the new products we are launching next year as well as news on innovations and marketing support initiatives. 

We are also developing a useful e-charter which will guarantee customers that we will only email them with things which we believe they will genuinely be interested in and that communication from us will be not exceed an agreed amount per month but, whether we will ever use the word cheap again in the subject line of our emails is still open to debate!