Tomorrow this email is going to go to a list of thousands of restaurant people who’ve self-identified as being owners or managers of independent restaurants. We’ll send a similar email (same format, but with different quotes and images) the following two Wednesdays. It’ll be the first email marketing we’ve done in about five years, and we’re curious to see how it goes.
We haven’t really ever been that interested in doing this type of thing for a few reasons, the chief one being that word-of-mouth is and will always be the sail that catches the wind to move our boat. Still, though, it’s an email we are proud to send because we don’t have features and benefits (other than “life is easier,” which I guess is a benefit), but rather we have some cool pics and brief quotes. It’s light on text and heavy on images, and it’s exactly what we had in mind when we asked Luke Pearson (our film partner who does the Restaurant Owners Uncorked video series with us) to design it. We don’t think most of the people on the list we are using get emails that look like this very often, and that’s the point. Hopefully this sucker will make them stop as they scroll through their inbox and think, “Woah, hold the phone, this is a cool-looking email…”
Our guess is that there are a lot of folks who will receive this email who’ve heard of Schedulefly by now, have been meaning to run the free trial, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Perhaps this will be the spring that bounces us up to the top of their to-do list.
Who knows? We’ll find out soon enough. I’ll try to remember to write an update later this summer to summarize whether the effort produced good results, and what we learned during the process.
Wil
P.s. (This is actually probably the most important point of my post): We love to draw inspiration from people and other companies outside our industry, not from other software companies. This email design was inspired by emails I get from a Hawaiian shoe company. The ROU videos were inspired by snow skiing and fly fishing videos we love. And we have in idea we’re simmering on right now inspired by my favorite band. So I guess my point is that while we keep a laser focus on serving our niche, we keep a wide-open mind on where to draw inspiration for ideas on how to better tell our story and foster admiration for our brand.