Your email inbox is probably one of the first things that you check in the morning when you wake up. The same goes for your customers that you want to reach. Make your impression on them with carefully tailored email marketing! Here are 5 steps to get started.
Step 1 – Get email addresses + find a email marketing platform!
You want to get into people’s’ inboxes so you can show them your content. How can you start? Here are some suggestions –
- Get referrals! Have your existing customers refer their friends to sign up for your newsletter, and offer your existing customers a special discount for doing so.
- Post your signup form page on LinkedIn and pay to have it sponsored.
- Create a giveaway – free products, a tour, an E-book, video, etc… Then require people to submit their email address in exchange for this free good/service.
- If you have an existing customer base – call them and personally ask them at the end of the conversation if you can add them to your email newsletter
- Hold an event at your business’s location – have people sign in with their email, phone number, and name!
There are many more, but this is just to get the creative juices going!
In order to actually start using the email addresses that you have acquired, you need to make an account with an email marketing provider – such as Mailchimp.com or Constant Contact. These websites offer free email marketing software that has paid features as you scale your operation to larger levels.
Step 2 – Encourage your readers to respond or reply.
If you are just throwing information at people without engaging them, they are just going to delete your email. This defeats the purpose of sending out emails to your potential clients or current customers. Here are a couple tips when you are crafting the emails that you are going to be sending out!
- Create an subject line that will be irresistible for people to open. You want your subject to be so enticing that people just have to open it! One way to do this – you can put a time limit to your offer in your subject line. Additionally, make your subject claim to be a solution a particular problem that people are having. If you are a hairdresser – you could claim that “these three tips have saved people’s hair from harsh chemicals found in standard beauty products!” If your followers on your email list are truly interested in hair care, they might be more inclined to open this email compared to “Protect your hair”. You want to make your subject seem like it is coming from a person – not a robot! Use language that is conversational whenever possible.
- Add personal elements to the emails – many email marketing services offer tools to insert the customer’s name into an automated message. This creates a sense of more personal connection and will increase click through.
- Keep your posts out of the spam folder. Here is a good link from Mailchimp that teaches you how to avoid ending up in the spam folder, because people can’t respond or engage if they never see your message —- Stay out of the SPAM folder! link here!
- Make your emails easy to open and read on mobile platforms. 2/3 of people open their emails on their smartphones – so you want to be sure that your email won’t be deleted because it is not easily read on someone’s smartphone!
Step 3 – Have enticing visuals.
If you can draw in your readers with a carefully worded subject line that is both enticing and has a call to action, you want to make sure that the people will stay and read the rest of the email. Incorporate great visuals into the email in conjunction with your text!
Step 4 – Test your emails to make sure they work on different email platforms.
What if half of your customers on your email list use a email service that makes your message look terrible and the customers don’t want to click through it? That’s not good. Here is a solution. There is a website called Litmus who provides a service that shows you what your email will look like on multiple different email platforms. Here is the link! https://litmus.com/email-testing
Step 5 – Don’t overwhelm your subscribers.
You want the people who are receiving your emails to stay on your mailing list! If you are constantly bombarding people with emails, they might get annoyed and will unsubscribe.
Start off your email marketing campaign slowly, maybe only send a couple of times a week. If you see a good response with the frequency that you have chosen, you could try to increase it some.
If you start noticing more people unsubscribing, tone down the frequency until you find a happy medium. Additionally, make it easy to unsubscribe from the email list at the bottom of the email. When people click this link, offer people a selection of how often they would like to receive emails in addition to the option of possibly unsubscribing altogether.
You may have people who want to see your content, just not as often as you are sending.
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