Episode 008: Email Marketing

Episode 008 - Email Marketing

Shawn Decker and Cesar Marron are the principal owners of Sketchbook and their wives, Alice George and Amy Wilkinson, are active business partners.

Today we will be talking to Alice George. Alice is a writer, consultant & teacher. She published her first book of poetry titled “This Must Be The Place” in fall of 2008. As a visual artist, Alice creates, exhibits and sells her work out of her Evanston studio. She is active in service to Chicago-area nonprofits including the Main- Dempster Mile. Alice handles a lot of the marketing activities for Sketchbook.

“I always say that Shawn and Cesar made the mistake of drinking and dreaming.”

Marketing The Brew Case History

Sketchbook Brewing’s Email Marketing Program

Sharing the Sketchbook Story

“From the very beginning I had a certain amount of confidence that people were interested in the (Sketchbook) story. That people weren’t just interested in the beer but they were interested in the story.”

Keep a rounded story. Give both news about the beer and news about the people.

A tone of fun and family.

“We were operating out of the alley. The name of our popular ipa Orange Door IPA comes because we just happened to not only find a great building, but a building with a vibrantly painted orange door. So we just kind of took that branding as a gift!”

Alice’s Content Ideas

Telling stories about what the next batch will be
Pictures of getting brewing equipment into the brewery
The visual story of building and opening the tap room
Some of it’s just promotion: selling beer and getting people to events
We have this whole wonderful posse of people out there looking for ideas and suggesting things
Meet the crew by introducing new employees
A picture of the Coaster of the Week (hand drawn on back of coaster by customers done in the tap room with colored pencils)

Alice’s Content Tips

Use dynamic content – they know there will be something new
Images help
Don’t deluge them – one email a week
Use a tone of sharing and story telling

Sketchbook’s Email Results

Open rates on total list of 2000: 40 – 42%
Open rates on 400 to 420 members: 70- 80%

“It is really interesting too, the whole balance between Facebook and email and finding it so interesting how often those audiences don’t overlap. We have both and I have people who never open their email and get everything from Facebook and vice versa. It reinforces the need to use both engines along with Instagram.”