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WHY SHOULD YOU USE EMAIL MARKETING IN YOUR BUSINESS?
Did you know that email Marketing offers the best return on investment?
81% of small to medium businesses say they rely on it for their customer retention. All the big companies are doing it, are you?
Despite this statistic, I still come across many small businesses and freelancers who don’t consider email marketing when it comes to generating leads or promoting their business. To ignore this aspect of marketing is to miss out on a huge opportunity to reach potential new clients and relationships with existing ones.
While email marketing may be considered “traditional” in comparison to social media it offers the best return on investment and puts you very much in control, unlike Social Media.
When you post on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin you are at the mercy of their algorithms. You might post something one day that reached thousands, then you share it again a few weeks later and it doesn’t go very far. We’ve all had that happen, right?
In comparison to other digital marketing methods, email marketing has remained pretty stable, despite GDPR! The rules of engagement with emails compared to other methods are straight forward and the only big change over the past few years is that now people are opening their emails on mobile devices 24/7, so the opportunities for business growth have increased.
The other huge difference between social media and email marketing is that your audience is mobile and I don’t just mean in the literal sense. You can take your list from one piece of software to another. If you don’t get on with one software just download your data and try another. By comparison, if you fall out of love with Facebook you can’t take your friends and followers to another platform, you have to start building up your audience all over again.
Get to know your audience
Emails enable you to connect with your audience on a personal level. You can ask specific questions, and use the information to tailor your marketing rather than sending out blanket emails. You can also encourage people to reply directly to you, enabling you to build one-to-one relationships with your readers. This helps to build the know, like and trust factor.
Social Media v Email Marketing
While Social media marketing undoubtedly has its place it only works when your target audience is active on the platform that you have chosen and provided the algorithms are working in your favour. How often have you missed updates from people because you were not on a specific platform that day? Social media is also fast-moving, to have a presence you need to spend an increasing amount of time engaging with it.
By comparison, emails sit in the inbox waiting to be discovered. They may not be opened immediately, some might never be opened but your brand will have been seen, your catchy headline will have been read and your reader will have been reminded that you are there for them when they are ready for what you have on offer.
People buy a product or service for various reasons but the key reasons are:
- They have a problem to solve
- They have a pain point that needs addressing
- hey have an emotional reaction to what they see
You’ve bought something on a whim for no other reason than it made you feel good, haven’t you?
By sending out regular emails you are effectively drip-feeding your readers with a reminder that you can either solve a specific problem or you can make them happy, hopefully, it’s both at once!
How do you get started?
You will need to use an appropriate platform such as Mailchimp. Do not ever use things like Gmail or Outlook for mass emails. You run the risk of having your account shut down and you cannot be GDPR compliant.
Guidance on how to be compliant can be found on the Information Commissioner’s Office website.
Software such as Mailchimp has numerous benefits, here are some of the key reasons to use email marketing software:
Mobile friendly
With most emails now being opened on a mobile device, your message needs to be readable on a smaller screen. Software such as Mailchimp ensures your message works on both desktop and mobile devices.
Hit your target market
You can use tags and segments to send out specific information to different sections of your list, ensuring that people only receive information that is relevant to them. This reduces your chances of people unsubscribing.
Analyse
The detailed reports that these platforms provide help you to improve future campaigns by showing you when your messages were opened, which links were clicked, which weren’t, who opened your message and loads more besides.
Automate
You can create automated messages. Welcome emails are a great opportunity to engage with your customer and build trust. A welcome email may be one of the most important ones you will ever send!
Visual
You can create visually engaging content with the ready-made templates and also set up our own branded templates.
Be personal
Providers such as Mailchimp enable you to fully personalise your messages. Personalisation helps create engagement and reduces your chances of ending up in the spam folder!
Newsletters
Before you start you need to decide what you want to send out. Newsletters are a good place to start. Newsletters are a powerful communication tool for creating engagement and building trust with your readers, whether they are new or existing customers.
A regular newsletter will help you:
• Keep your customers updated with your latest news.
• Enable you to share helpful information that showcases your skills.
• Promote your products, services and offers.
• Generate regular traffic to your website, page or blog.
What is your goal?
Each newsletter/email should have a clear goal and be part of a larger and planned email strategy.
The strategy does not have to be complicated, it could be as simple as a plan to send out one email a month for 12 months.
Each email should have a specific aim and a clear call to action. For example, if you are a yoga teacher you might use your emails to explain how specific exercises can help alleviate pain in specific parts of the body. You could run a series of emails with each one mentioning a different exercise and have a call to action which asks the reader to book into a class.
Who is it for?
Decide who you are sending your email to. It could be an email to your whole list about a new offer or it could be a segmented email to a specific section of your list. It’s not always easy to find a subject to send to your whole list so aim to find contacts that have similar interests and send out segmented emails with the content tweaked to suit the reader group. If you have yet to collect this type of data then consider things like age, geographical area, gender, and purchase history (if applicable). Mailchimp makes it very easy to add tags to your contacts so that you can group them based on different variables.
What do you want to achieve with the newsletter?
Before you start writing, decide the purpose of the email. It could be to generate sales, showcase your expertise, increase traffic to your website, solve a problem for your reader, gain more followers etc. It doesn’t matter what it is so long as you have decided before you start to create it. Remember to add your call to action and make it clear. Examples of a call to action are:
- Read the blog here
- Book your place
- Find out more
- Order now
Content
Your content could be a product update, editorial content about a specific problem you solve, sharing a new blog, explaining a new product or service, or news about your business ……
What will the frequency be?
Decide how often you plan to send out your emails, let your readers know and stick to it. You can do this in the welcome email and also on the sign-up form which is used to collect new subscribers.
Don’t end up as Spam!
To ensure your newsletter is not banished to the spam folder you need to ensure that your content will add value to your readers.
Add an engaging subject line and preview. Don’t make the content all about you, make it relevant to the reader.
Offer value and deliver what you said you would when people signed up to hear from you.
Send it out at the same time each week/month.
Represent your brand
Create a template that your customers will recognise. Use your logo and colours to give it your brand identity so that people will know who it’s from before they read a single word.
Use a verified email domain rather than something like Gmail. Hotmail. Email service providers like Mailchimp don’t like these providers and can reduce the deliverability of your emails. Aside from that, you want to look professional and using a domain name does that.
Get noticed
Most people have a short attention span, so you need to catch the readers’ attention fast. Your first opportunity to do this is with the subject line. A subject line can make or break a campaign so make sure yours is eye-catching. The use of humour is always a good way to get attention as are questions.
Personalise the subject line, our eyes are always drawn to our names! Mailchimp enables you to personalise your subject line, your preview text and your content very easily.
Once your message is opened you need to get your main message read fast, so position the most important information first, above the fold. That way your readers won’t need to scroll down to see it.
Call to action
Have your Call to Action (CTA) prominent and ideally positioned above the fold. The CTA is a prompt (usually a button) which aims to get your reader to perform a certain action such as visiting your website, placing an order, downloading a document etc.
Don’t include multiple CTAs, it confuses the reader.
Make your CTA button bold, and use your brand colours.
Choose words that encourage action and that have a sense of urgency.
Mailchimp has an easy method of creating a stand-out customised CTA button.
Images
Use images but not so many that it detracts from your core message and clutters up the email.
Always add an alt-tag to your images as some providers such as Outlook turn off images in the preview mode. Alt tags will be displayed in place of an image if an image file cannot be loaded.
Finally, always link your campaigns to your social media profiles. You can design a template so that you only have to do this once.
Before you send your email make sure you preview it and check all the links are working. Also, do a spell-check (Grammarly is a good free tool for this).
Analysis
As you send out more campaigns you will begin to build up a picture of your audience. Compare the results of each campaign and see if you can identify trends and things like the best time to send
Email Marketing offers the best return on investment and 81% of small to medium businesses say they rely on it for their customer retention. All the big companies are doing it so why not you?
If you need help with your email marketing or want to learn how to use Mailchimp you can book a one-off training session here https://calendly.com/hello-sam-j/one-hour-mailchimp-training-session or book a no-obligation discovery call so we can discuss how I can best help you: https://calendly.com/hello-sam-j/30min
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