Not sure how to use email or newsletters to stay connected with your customers? At its core, email marketing is time efficient, affordable, and effective (if used correctly). Outlined below are the fundamentals of email marketing and helpful tips for using it as part of your overall marketing strategy.
Email Marketing Basics
Email marketing that utilized great copywriting and content is a great way to bring potential and current customers back to your website. Overall, it’s relatively easy to set up an email newsletter and send it to your audience. Customers who’ve subscribed to your newsletter or agreed to receive emails with offers and company news want to get information from you. They want to hear from you! Because the audience is already interested in your product and the cost of email marketing is relatively low (basically time and effort), it has a fairly high return on investment.
We all sit in front of a computer at least once a day or regularly check our phones for email—which makes it a great method for reaching out to customers with news and deals. Emailing your customers regularly ensures that your company comes to mind more readily and they’ll likely come back to shop when they need something. BUT, your emails need to be interesting, well written and engage the customers in order to get positive results. Your customers are just like you—they’ll stop reading and unsubscribe from your emails if they don’t like your content or if you flood their inbox.
Also, though the potential return on investment is small, creating new and engaging content for a newsletter can be a lot of work, especially for a small business owner. Emails cannot simply direct people to check out your website or blog, they need to contain new content that’s not anywhere else on your site and is useful to your customers.
Tips of the Trade
- Ask for Permission. Only send emails to those who have specifically requested them. If the recipient doesn’t know you or your company, they will delete the message and mark it as spam.
- Make it Relevant. Make sure the content you’re including is interesting, new, and RELEVANT to your customers.
- Check Your Metrics. It’s easy to track the open and click-through rates of each message you send. Also, you’ll want to track your bounce-backs and unsubscribes for potential problem areas (number of emails, relevance of content, interest of user, etc.).
- Make it Count. This type of marketing campaign works best when integrated with other online media, such as your website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest—whichever works best for your product or service. Consider adding social media buttons to the footer of each email so readers can easily find you online and connect with you.
If this seems like something you’d like to incorporate into your current marketing plan—or you need a full marketing strategy tailored to your business—Growth Squad can help you get the most of your marketing budget.
