A Year of Duluth Trading Co. Emails

A Year of Duluth Trading Co. Emails

What’s it like to be on the other end of your company’s email newsletter/exclusive offers? For a comparison, I’m going to let you match up your efforts over the last 12 months with the efforts of a top-tier catalog marketer, Duluth Trading Co.

Duluth Trading has been hailed as a model in business to consumer direct mailing advertising. They pride themselves on their large following which many attribute to their highly visual, target specific email advertisements. It has been said that “they know their customer.”

One of the elements that makes their emails effective is that highly visual, color illustrations are used in each one, which depict, often in a humorous way, a member of the target audience utilizing one of their products. The target audience in this sample are men, involved in highly active blue collar employment or outdoor activities. (with the secret being that many of their customers are in white collar professions) Understanding a target audience and boldly advertising specifically toward them tends to expand your audience. (I’m sure someone smarter than I can explain why, but it happens.) Are you afraid of zoning in too specifically on one target group and ostracizing other audiences? Don’t be. Speak clearly to one audience and then sort on the back end.

Duluth Trading uses the power of attention grabbing subject lines in their emails in order to ensure that their audience takes a second look. For instance an advertisement for boxer shorts screams from your screen, “Go Buck Naked! Underwear so comfortable it’s like wearing nothing at all!” Bold statements to get a chuckle and make me feel as if opening the email had not been a total waste of time. While scanning the email, it’s easy to see important details such as pricing, shipping, and testimonials.

Check the testimonials which are inserted subtly throughout the ad. The professions are listed which immediately identify the product with a certain type of man. Industrious, hardworking, manual job titles such as “Oil Field Construction” assure the prospective customer that men just like him are using this product and loving it.

If there’s any complaint in the Duluth approach, it’s the constant barrage of special promo codes. The good news is that they are specific to each mailing with time limits, but it’s less of a “conversation” and more of a monologue. I get it that this encourages the reader to waste no time in making their next purchase and people love special insider deals that the average visitor may not be getting, but it’s worth testing response rates to non-offer emails to avoid the message that if you don’t shop right this moment, then you won’t get a deal . . . until the next email.

So, in the end what can you take from this exercise? Self-depricating humor, knowing your audience and testing the upper limits of frequency are tactics worth testing this year.

(if you want to peer through the year in emails, run through the pdf by clicking here)

Good stuff.