Hello Everyone, I hope your all doing well! I thought today I would focus on Email Marketing. If you have any ideas on what you would like to see in future posts let me know in the comments below! I will be posting at least twice a week with new content so stay tuned!
Many brands and companies have abandoned email since the rise in social media. However, it is considered less intrusive than cold calling and offers a direct line to your recipient that isn’t as easy to miss or scroll past on social media! Remember it isn’t for every business and just because you can do it doesn’t mean it will work for you!
how do you build up Email lists?
Many brands and businesses offer vouchers or coupons for returning customers who sign up to their mailing lists, this could work for you if you have a product or service based company but be careful not to end up with a loss at the end of the day!
If you have a website an easy way to build a mailing list would be to encourage customers to sign up/login with their email and tick the communications box. This will help you in establishing returning customers and see what they have purchased and send communications directly linked to that or similar items!
Coordinate all your marketing platforms if you have; social media, website, in-store and/or adverts then promote signing up to your mailing list! Many people overlook that you can use your platforms cohesively to promote a new strategy or business message instead thinking that each platform is exclusively for that i.e. social media is just for social media and that is all you can discuss! (Which is such a huge missed opportunity!)
Cost!
As with everything cost is a main factor! If your running your business single handed or you have a large brand to manage then you may need to hire content writers or marketeers specifically for managing your email marketing strategy. This can quickly add up so carefully consider if it will impact your business at all before you undertake a new strategy!
Personalise!
The most important thing to consider without a doubt! If you were writing a personal email would you write it to the addressee and a subject line that helps them distinguish what the email is about? Of course you would! So why do some of the larger brands and companies forget to address it and more importantly have the worst subject lines!
Catching people’s attention is one of the main struggles with emails, if they think it’s just spam or has no relevance to them whatsoever they will either delete or unsubscribe! Make sure they know it’s from you!
Timing!
Try to schedule your emails for the same time and be consistent with them whether you send out emails; daily, weekly or monthly.
Don’t just spam email repeatedly multiple times a day with the same messages! This is just annoying and unnecessary leading to people unsubscribing for good. Instead make sure each message has a purpose you should be aiming to build a rapport with your subscribers not just sell!
Focus on Content!
A familiar theme that I always mention is quality content! It does require more time and work but the long term approach of curated personalised content that tries to engage with the recipient vs a copy and paste email template sent repeatedly every week is clear.
This will result in higher levels of engagement with your recipients who will be more likely to read and open emails that are not only personalised to them but have content that they are actually interested in!
What content can you use?
People think email marketing is just a boring written email and choose instead to ignore email in favour of social media posts! While this is a good strategy for certain businesses it won’t work for all businesses! (Just like email isn’t for everyone either!)
While social media posts limit you in word count and how many people see your post, email is a direct line to your consumer and might often be your first communication with them so you have to impress!
You can build a Newsletter every month showcasing your products and consumer reviews, talk about things that matter to your consumer it could be anything from huge global issues like climate change or more focused on their local area. Whatever works but remember it must align with your business values and mission statements people can see through attempts to appear trendy supporting popular issues while having no history of support.
You can offer vouchers and coupons but you can also share your blog posts, links to your social media pages and of course website if you have one!
You could recommend things to do or places to go in the local area or work with other businesses in your area to promote one another! You could link to causes or set out to inform your readers about issues that you support that align with your core business values!
The most important thing to remember is to be genuine! People respond to content that they are interested in when they know the source behind it is a real person and not just copy and pasted content!
Do you have an email marketing strategy? What are some of your pet peeves with email marketing? Please let me know in the comments below!
Thanks so much for reading and take care!
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