5 Emails You Should Be Sending To Wholesale Customers (+ Free Templates)

You know that keeping in touch with your wholesale customers is important, but what do you send them all?

It’s not enough to just forward a monthly newsletter anymore.

Email marketing these days is about personalization and timing, more so than just regular content.

Gone are the days when you can get away with a simple email blast to your customer list. If you want your email marketing to deliver an ROI in 2018 and beyond then you need to start adjusting your approach.

So what do you send? How do you make it so that you won’t be just sitting there writing personal emails to people all day?

This article will give you 5 ideas for emails that you can send to your customers along with free templates that you can use to get started today.

Why Keeping In Touch Is So Important For Your Email Marketing Strategy

You probably already know that you should be doing email marketing.

But have you thought about why are you doing it?

As with any relationship, if you don’t want it to atrophy, keeping in touch is essential. It’s how you maintain personal relationships and that same methodology applies to business as well. You can (and should) be applying the same thinking to your wholesale customers.

If you want to have a long and fruitful business relationship with someone it’s important that they feel comfortable and friendly.

How much is too much?

Your customers want to know that you are thinking of them, but there is a fine line between communicating too much and not enough.

You want to hit that sweet spot right in the middle.

If you can continue to add value to their business over time then you might contact them as frequently as weekly.

If that sounds like too much, listen to your gut and maybe try fortnightly contacts or monthly. That’s only 12 times a year and over that kind of period, it doesn’t really sound like much at all.

5 Kind Of Emails You Can Send To Keep In Touch

Here are the meat and potatoes of this article.

The key to keeping your communications from sounding one-sided and making them fresh and light is mixing things up so you’re not just asking for orders all the time or sending junk offers.

Below are 5 different kinds of emails that you can drop into your marketing strategy. Why not try a new one each month for 5 months, then circle back and repeat the ones you deem successful later in the year.

1. Offer samples of new products and survey their opinion

In our popular wholesale marketing strategy guide, we suggested that sending samples was a common strategy employed worldwide in the manufacturing industry and that you could adapt that to your wholesale business marketing.

We also said that using samples is something that not many businesses use as an after-sale technique.

So whether you are launching a new product line or you would like to introduce an existing customer to something they haven’t ordered yet, you can use this type of email to drum up more business.

Your free email template:

Hi [Customer name]!

Just wanted to let you know quickly that I’ve popped a sample for XYZ product in the mail for you today.

It’s a great product because [Reason 1] and I think your customers would love it because [Reason 2].

That should arrive on your doorstep in about [Number of days]. Would love to hear what you think when you have a chance to look it over!

Thanks in advance,

[You]

This works great because: Asking for their opinion will let them know you value what they have to say and help introduce them to new products without being too pushy.

2. Send them a personalized coupon

We’ve all tried the bulk coupon mailout approach in our businesses and at some point, and it probably didn’t work quite as well as you had hoped.

The fact is that most coupon mailouts get less than a 5% uptake rate.

The key to making this work as a strategy is using personalization.

Forget fancily designed email headers and jazzed up copy. Personalizing the email and making it plain text (and sent directly from you and not a noreply@ email address) will make it much more effective.

You can even target who you send this to by rewarding the behaviour you want to see. Here’s an example of an email template you could send if a customer makes multiple orders within a month.

Your free email template:

Hi [Customer name],

I noticed that you’ve made a few orders with us this month already.

I just wanted to reach out and say a huge thanks. We really appreciate it.

If you have anything else you needed to pick up before the month is out, I’ve created a special coupon just for you to get a further 10% off whatever you’re ordering.

You can use the code “[Customer name]ISAWESOME[MONTH]10”.

Thanks again, I hope you have a great rest of the month!

[Your name]

This works great because: Personalisation is everything. Wholesalers want to feel like they’re important to your business and as such a personal touch like this can really work wonders for your sales.

3. Offer assistance in unexpected ways

Your “keeping in touch” emails don’t always have to be about drumming up orders. What other ways can you help your wholesale customers?

Can you provide some marketing materials? Maybe write a blog post? Maybe you can help them do a competition with your products?

A simple reach out email can open up so many opportunities.

Your free email template:

Hi [Customer name],

I’m on a bit of a blogging kick at the moment and I’m looking to put the feelers out and write some content on sites like yours.

Would you be open to doing a guest blog post?

I have these post ideas in mind which I think would be a great fit for your audience:

• [Post Title Idea 1]
• [Post Title Idea 2]
• [Post Title Idea 3]

Let me know what you think, would be great to shoot something across to you this week!

Cheers,

[Your name]

This works great because: You get to keep in touch, add value and do something useful for both you and your customer all at the same time, it’s a win all round!

4. Ask them what their goals are

The more you know about your wholesale customers the more you can assist them and build on the relationship.

A great way to facilitate this is by asking them directly what their big goals are for the month or the quarter. This will help you know what they are concentrating on and to see if there is any way you can help them out.

Maybe you can help them reach their goal directly or maybe you might be able to put them in touch with someone that you know could help. It reminds them that you are there to provide assistance and are willing and able to go out of your way to do so.

Your free email template:

Hi [Customer name],

It’s the start of [Quarter 2/Month] already!

A quick question for you – what is your main goal you’re trying to smash at the moment? I’d love to help if I can.

[Your name]

This is great because: You can start connecting the dots – whether its connecting them to certain people, telling them about products or maybe marketing techniques. This is intangibly valuable to building the relationship.

5. See if they want a free review of how they’re marketing your products

Want your wholesale customers to order more product from you?

One way to boost those numbers is by offering your help with how they are marketing your products.

This is, of course, best if you can do it 1-on-1. Especially if you can go and see your customers in-person because then you get to react in real-time to their requirements.

However, not all of us are in a position to physically do that. A more scalable way to handle this would be to send out an email with a free coaching offer to review how they’re marketing your products.

You can use a service like Calendly or YouCanBook.me which are both online meeting scheduler tools that show your availability and let your customers reserve time with you that gets placed directly into your calendar.

Your free email template:

Hi [Customer name],

I’m running some free 30 minute coaching sessions this month to review how you’re marketing our products and see how we could help you boost sales.

Are you in?

You can click here to lock in a time with me:

[Link]

Looking forward to chatting!

[Your name]

To keep the calls short and focused you can formulate a checklist of best practices to go through during each call.

This is great because: You get to talk with people 1-on-1 in a scalable manner. The insights you learn from these calls will be amazing and better yet, when people implement them they will sell more and in-turn order more product.

Bonus Tip: Leverage Email Automations To Make It Handsfree

If you don’t like the idea of having to remember to keep in touch or send certain “touching base” type emails, you can leverage automation to do this job for you.

FunnelKit Automations let you create email sequences that get triggered automatically, like the following:

• Fire emails on a timer (eg. every 3 months)
• Fire an email sequence based on “winning back” a customer who hasn’t ordered in a while
• Set a sequence of emails to go our in monthly or weekly intervals after a wholesale customer signs up

Leveraging automation is smart and makes your business more resilient. FunnelKit is a great tool for achieving this.

Conclusion: Keeping in touch will bring more repeat business

Email marketing is still the top dog when it comes to marketing your business to wholesale customers.

Being top of mind, helping them sell more and nurturing the relationship all have the intangible benefit of bringing you more repeat business.

Make a commitment to yourself to try out each of these tactics over the next 5 months.

Josh Kohlbach CEO

Josh is the founder of Rymera Web Co, the makers of Wholesale Suite and many other plugins. He's a business marketing geek and chronic reader; you'll often find his nose buried in some obscure book.

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