Gardening company discovers greener grass on the GraphicMail side and doubles organic website traffic

Already in their second year of using GraphicMail, organic food gardens and training organization “Living Green” has learned how to leverage email newsletters to increase their business activity.

With their most recent monthly newsletter, for example, they achieved an open rate that's 30% higher and a click-through rate which is 3 times more than the average for all of our senders between October 2010 - October 2011:

Living Green Monthly Newsletter - March

StartLivingGreen March 2012 - Time to Plant

Since June 2011, they have seen a substantial upshot in their newsletter sign-ups and engagement levels, primarily through working to promote subscriptions via social networks and making their emails less text-heavy and more visually oriented.

Living Green has been in operation since November 2008. Initially providing broad green consulting services to domestic and commercial clients, the company now focuses exclusively on sustainable agriculture;  designing and creating organic, edible gardens across Cape Town.

They also provide conservation-agriculture training and consulting services to smallholdings, NGOs, and community organisations across Southern Africa.

When asked if they’ve made use of other email marketing software before, they answered yes, mentioning that the alternatives they tried out were not as user-friendly as GraphicMail:

“The interface was slow and outdated, the editor was hard to use, and the templates were limited. It also lacked important features such as the statistics of each send as well as social integration tools.”

Says Sam Adams, Owner and Director of Living Green: “Email Marketing with GraphicMail is a powerful way to communicate with my customers and business acquaintances. My website traffic doubles the week the newsletter goes out. It has given me new business, repeat business and many other enquiries and positive feedbacks.”

“I have been impressed with two things about GraphicMail. Firstly, their technical excellence. The interface is easy to use and has many features, in fact there's nothing missing that I can think of. Secondly, their customer service. Whenever I've had a question or a challenge, they have been quick to respond and very helpful. The GraphicMail system makes sending  bulk emails to my database an ease and a pleasure.”

When asked if he had any emailing tips for other marketers, Adams shared a few helpful hints gained from his experience:

1) Work hard on the design in the early stages so that it is easy to update each month.

2) Prepare all your images beforehand and then bulk upload rather than individually uploading through the editor interface.

3) Send regular newsletters and stick to a sending schedule.

“GraphicMail provided a free intro, which gave me the opportunity to explore. This was invaluable to confirm my decision to leave the other provider. The GraphicMail pricing is very reasonable and has all the tools I have needed for creating newsletters.”