Customer Spotlight: Hawaiian Isles’ Helpful Emails

By Amanda Gagnon October 10, 2011

As you know, the key to responses to your email marketing offers is a careful balance of helpful, relevant, interesting, entertaining, all-around saintly emails, written with the right audience in mind and tested for optimal performance.

Now, we could do the marketing-blog thing and throw that advice at you, wish you luck and go check our Twitter stream. But that’d leave you frustrated. So here, we’ll show you instead. A screenshot’s worth a thousand buzzwords, right?

One of our customers, Hawaiian Isles Kona Coffee, really strikes the balance between helpful email content and relevant offers. And they’re not a huge intimidating company whose output you could never match. They’re a hardworking small business with an ideal email campaign.

So here I present for your perusal and inspiration:

A Month of Kona Emails

Day 1: Hawaiian Isles: Welcome to Our Newsletter

HI’s welcome email covers it all – sets expectations, requests whitelisting, invites feedback and provides an action to take (emailing questions).

Day 2: Hawaiian Isles: Brief Kona Coffee History

By describing the exotic locales of the coffee’s origin, HI’s not only educates its readers, it plays into the American culture code for shopping – reconnecting with life.

Day 5: Hawaiian Isles: Storage Tips

If customers don’t properly store their coffee, it may spoil quickly, giving the product a bad reputation. These tips keep the coffee fresh and delicious – good for the customer, good for the company.

Day 6: Bulk Sale on HCR!

After several informative messages, it’s time for an offer. HI keeps their recommendation simple and clear.

Day 8: Hawaiian Isles: Cleaning Tips

Like the storage tips, these cleaning instructions not only educate the customer, they keep the coffee tasting fresh.

Day 11: Hawaiian Isles: Brewing Tips

The same applies to the brewing tips – extra value, extra happy customers.

Day 13: Hawaiian Isles Email Newsletter: Island Chef’s Signature Series

Now that readers know how to care for their coffee, it’s time to offer them another chance to buy some. Framed as a signature series, it’s evident why this offer is special.

Day 14: Hawaiian Isles: All About Ground Coffee

Any readers who’ve ordered from the previous day’s broadcast can read up on some fun facts about their coffee while they wait for it to arrive in the mail.

Day 20: Hawaiian Isles Email Newsletter: 24 oz Big Bag Sale!

At this point, the follow up series is done, but subscribers still get weekly offers and sale alerts.

Day 27: Hawaiian Isles Email Newsletter – Double Your Kona Rewards Points!

They also get exclusive invitations and rewards, such as this offer for double reward points after a purchase.

Breaking It Down

So how are Hawaiian Isles’ emails so helpful? Well, they start by addressing this question:

“If you’re using my product (or service), what do you need to know to really get the best experience out of using this product or service?”

Then they answer the question that naturally follows, “What do you probably not know that, if you did, would lead you to buy more?”

There are a few things they can tweak to make their campaign even better, though:

1. The intervals between emails are rather short. Spread out the follow ups, and appreciation for the helpful information will last longer. (Plus, what if I haven’t cleaned my coffee pot yet?)
2. The design of the broadcasts and follow ups should match. It looks like HI started using a new template for their broadcasts and just hasn’t updated their follow up design yet.

Otherwise, HI shows an impressive level of thoughtfulness. Do you know of any other email campaigns that make you sit up and take notice?