As our 5-year contract draws to a close, we continue to over-achieve on our permission email open rates for for NEW ENGLAND HYDROPONICS. Our ‘First Look’ August Deals send hit a final 45.4% (8.17.22 update). The category average is 17% (Springbot ESP).
Our strategy: create imaging and copy with an appropriate balance of the emotive and transactional. To communicate only the transactional “Sale” is not a strategy: it’s a “seen-that, been-there” boring tactic with little to no cumulative benefit to the brand or its equity.
Key to the emotion – my very own sunflowers in my garden! Who doesn’t love sunflowers!
But the ‘secret’ is in the subject and preview lines – what we used to call ‘headlines’ in display advertising. Call me if you like to know them.
Call me, Tom Lanen, at 508 951-0130 if you’d like more than the ordinary from your email and brand marketing/sales support programs. On my nickel, of course.
Cha-Cha-Cha Changes! It’s said all good things come to an end, and so it is with our 5-year contract with New England Hydroponics, and its new parent company, Hydrobuilder Holdings, to whom my principal, Ethan Holmes, sold the business and brand in January. I’ve been informed they will take the work in-house and will let our contract expire at the end of August … even as our work continues to over-perform, as evidenced in our email Open Rate report below – the category average is 17% (Springbot ESP).
Frankly, this is exactly how most mergers go, and we’re not terribly surprised. Even if it’s a bit of a jolt to the system. Hey, we’re human. But it happened when 3 Thermo Electron business units with whom we had worked for 15 years merged with Fisher Scientific and the agency of record took over. They rightly compensated us for our copyright & imaging, and were very honorable during the transition.
Fact is it’s been a great 5 years (almost), and we’ve accomplished our mission: to create salable brand equity for Ethan for when it became his time to sell the business. When I started with him in 2017, he’d been doing all his own marketing and no longer had any time for it. He’d built the business to 3 stores, one of which we moved into a space 4 times the size within the year. Then we added stores in Seekonk (6000 sf), and recently in Sanford, Maine (13,000 sf) bringing the total to 5, all while building the online business at neHydro.com into what is now 4500+ products. We worked well together, and I’m proud of the good work we did, and of the friendships I’ve enjoyed with store GMs and Supervisors. These are good folks.
But it’s time for what’s next.
If you have a business and a vision, give me, Tom Lanen, at (508) 951-0130 and let’s chat a bit on my nickel.
The Difference Is You.™ I can help you present your business and brand well, and drive near-term sales & revenue …. and fully prepare your brand as a line item in your endgame that could be closer than you think. T-
Final Art for Conversion to Billboard Large Format Printing
(July 2022) When Thomas Marketing Services client New England Hydroponics opened its 5th location in Sanford, Maine, its 3rd since we became NEH’s marketing firm in 2017, and 1st outside Massachusetts, it faced a dilemma: outdoor/billboards were outlawed in Maine years ago. So one of the most proven effective media for the category was not an option.
While I had advocated for the larger format bulletin format, which are typically stand-alone boards offering greater visibility and better leadership positioning (“the only”), when this small format billboard became available at one-third the cost, Hydrobuilder Holdings’ (NEH parent company) media buyer decided the repetitions/branding dynamic made most sense give the limited co-op budget we had – and I could not disagree. The one take-away lesson: know who the board beside you will be so it doesn’t erode your position, in this case a political issue we will not have on our website.
But as we like to say: there is always an answer. So we started exploring board avails in MA and southern NH, finally settling on an illuminated board located on a secondary, but highly travelled route going toward Sanford from NH.
While it’s always hard to track results of out-of-home advertising, within a day of its posting, an older couple came into the store telling us they “saw the billboard in Somerset” and made a small purchase, but promised “we’ll be back – we run a hydroponics farm in NH and are thrilled to know you’re here.”
By any measure that’s good start. Tom Lanen, TMSC principal and Creative Director wrote and created imaging and art for the billboard; he also wrote the bad ‘dad pun’ headline for this post. Hydrobuilder Holdings Marketing placed the media. It will run 6 months.
We had some ‘luck’ with our mid-May 2022 permission email created and executed on behalf of client New England Hydroponics – an Open Rate of 44.6% vs the 17% industry average. That’s 262% of the norm!
The mailing featured the Everyday Deals POS sign we created last month, and is short and sweet.
The subject line (headline) of the mailing:
🍀 New! Everyday Deals for Everyday Gardeners!
The Preview (Subhead):
Get Great Deals on Gear & Supplies – Every Day!
As you can see from earlier mailings notedermission, our results are not a fluke.
Need some luck? Give me, Tom Lanen, a call at (508) 951-0130, and let’s chat a bit on my nickel. Or send me an email of inquiry in confidence: [email protected]
Store Door & Register POS graphic repurposed for email
I’ve had a productive, albeit challenging and single-minded week creating and fielding a new multi-faceted & branded Everyday Deals promotion initiative for client New England Hydroponics (a Hydrobuilder Holdings unit). Everything in the visual, along with website product posting, was created in 6 business days – moving at the speed of retail!
Nothing like the adrenaline of creating a new branded promotion! (Click the image to expand your view of the elements.)
Up first was the creation of the branded promotional logo, a “Violator” BOOM burst featuring the primary green in the brand design palette as the primary brand “touch point.”
The strategy was to use it as a point-of-sale tactic, on labels & Buyer’s Guides for individual products, maintaining the singular DEAL singular focus for a singular customer shopping that moment; and tucking in the stylistic lower case ‘everyday’ into the larger font construction to hold/work together as a unified brand design element.
Then, finding letterform on the plural DEALS didn’t work with the same compact footprint of the original violator BOOM, and wanting to expand the concept to attach an emotion to a transactional concept, I went back a standing strategic brand design tactic, the sunburst and its positive feeling, to create some branded drama and expand the focus to the overall portfolio of products in the category.
I executed Point-Of Sale signage in two sizes, Social Media and website imagery, both the primary & category pages, to this branded design strategy. Our plan is to more fully roll out the promotion across the media/web and in-store touch points.
