One of my favorite breweries right now is just down the road from me: Sketchbook Brewing Co. in Evanston, IL. For me, there are two main reasons they have been growing like they have. The first is brewing tasty beers that foreground distinctive flavor profiles rather than showy or gimmicky ingredients. The second is developing a connection to the community through events, their membership club, and their digital marketing.

Alice George, a writer and artist and wife of co-founder Shawn Decker, is the force behind Sketchbook’s digital strategy, and in an interview with Steve Schmidt on Market the Brew she revealed something counter-intuitive about how she gets email open rates of 40-80%.

Her big secret? She doesn’t try that hard.

How to Not Try

That really needs clarifying. Of course she works hard at maintaining her email list and at developing interesting content for their weekly newsletter, and on the Market the Brew episode page you’ll see a series of tips she shared in her 25-minute interview.

When I say she doesn’t try that hard, I mean she doesn’t try that hard to develop her email list. It’s almost an anti-marketing strategy.

Again, this is by her own admission. She thinks of the list’s growth as an organic process that began with their Kickstarter and shifted to festival sign-ups and is most of the time driven by a passive email-capture form on their webpage. Outside of that, she doesn’t do much at all to get folks to give her an email address. She lets them come to her. That’s legitimately organic, yo.

That means the list has grown at probably a slower rate than you want your own to grow, and maybe her list is smaller than you want yours to be, but when a 3% open rate is considered industry standard, we have to acknowledge that she’s killing it on the email front. Her general list is getting 40-42% and her CSB-members list gets 70-80% opens.

Be Not Too Quick to Scoff

You might be thinking, “Okay, but those numbers are inflated because she’s not building the list aggressively.”

Fine, but listen to yourself. You’re making excuses to justify your own performance rather than actually learning from what she’s saying.

In small business marketing, you hear folks say all the time:

Better 100 active names than 1,000 inactive.

The logic is that, though your reach is smaller with only 100 names, those 100 active readers are the likeliest to actually bring you their business, i.e., spend their money on you. You’ll earn more from those 100 active than you would from having 1,000 addresses from folks who filled out a form to get a free koozy and went on their way.

“The open rate reflects the fact that people choose to join the list,” George says. “The basic message [is] grow slowly, grow organically, and great things will happen.”

What would you rather have, a list of 100 names and 40 people reading at any given time, or a list of 1,000 names and only 30 people reading? That’s some powerful math, right there.

I think the takeaway is that, just like with content, simply having reach does not mean you’re doing a good job. You want to have the right kind of reach, especially if you’re a brewery or distillery that thrives on having a local character.

The word Alice George kept using over and over again was story. It’s probably marketing’s favorite word, right now, but that’s because it’s powerful, done right.

So don’t kill yourself just trying to get names and build a list. Focus on providing good content for the folks who are actually reading what you’re sending them.

If you want to learn more about an email marketing strategy designed to hook your ideal customers, contact me today to schedule a call.

Image credit: SketchbookBrewing.com