Taylor Dance Center is the third place winner of the 2010 Q4 VR500 Awards for Email Marketing Excellence! We went behind the scenes with them and conducted an interview about their email marketing program. Melissa Gosling of Taylor Dance Center provided some good insight into how email marketing has helped their business. She also has some tips you can use for your business, too!

VR: Before we get started, can you provide a little background about your business?

Melissa Gosling: Taylor Dance Center is a dance studio located north of Dallas in McKinney, TX. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary. There are about 300 families at our studio.

VR: Was there an obstacle you were trying to overcome that lead you to email marketing?

Melissa Gosling: Our biggest issue was communication. We didn’t have an easy or cost effective way to keep our families informed about what was going on. This was a major issue for us.

VR: How did you get started with email marketing?

Melissa Gosling: We jumped right in and started our email campaigns in October – right after school started. We send out newsletters once a month with important and helpful information for our student’s parents.

VR: Do you have any advice you’d like to share with other small businesses about email marketing?

Melissa Gosling: My biggest tip is to make sure the information is timely and relevant to your customers. If they think they will get something useful from the email, they will make sure they read it. But if it has a lot of useless information, you will lose that reader. We use content of our own, and include links to useful information we find on the internet.

VR: What kind of results have you seen?

Melissa Gosling: We ran a customer satisfaction survey in our last newsletter and had some interesting finds:

1. 87% of our respondents said email newsletters are the number one way they stay informed with our business.
2. 98% of respondents said they preferred to use the email newsletter to stay updated (Facebook was second at 25%).

We have been told that people feel much more informed since we implemented the newsletter, and that has greatly improved our customer satisfaction.

VR: What does your VR500 Award mean to you?

Melissa Gosling: We were honored to receive the award, as email marketing is new to us. As a small business we have to watch every nickel and dime that we spend, so it is great news that our results are great – but more importantly that our customers feel taken care of!

VR: Thanks so much for sharing your email marketing success story, Melissa!

For more insight into their email marketing campaigns, check out their February newsletter: Taylor Dance Center News. You can also find Taylor Dance Center on Twitter and Facebook.

Discover more VerticalResponse customer success stories on our Case Studies page. And check out or VR500 Awards page to find out how you can be eligible to win.

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