Social networking platforms are constantly tweaking their algorithms to ensure you have to pay to play as a business. Some estimate that a Facebook business page post only reaches about 2% of its visitors. We still advocate engaging with your customers on Facebook and other social media, but there is a more direct way to reach your audience: email marketing.
Reduced Time and Energy
It goes without saying that email marketing is more cost-effective and takes considerably less time than setting up a print or telesales campaign. Depending on how complex you want to make your email marketing template, it’s entirely possible to turn out a marketing communications piece in less than two hours. Using recurring email templates, you just need to do is to approve the copy for the email and any changes to graphics, pick your mailing list, and then schedule it to send.
Generating Excitement
Email marketing gives you an opportunity to create an exclusive club for your mailing list. By giving out exclusive content through your email newsletters, you make your subscribers feel special, generating excitement over your content. Think about offering insider tips, ideas, or news that’s relevant to your business. Making it something your customers can use instead of something that directly benefits you will build trust and make more likely that your recipients will open emails from you. (Just be sure not to cross-post this information on Facebook or other social media, if you want to maintain exclusivity.)
Real-Time Communication
One of the biggest advantages of email marketing is that you don’t need a long lead time to create a campaign. Need to reduce inventory right away or generate new leads quickly? You can send a message the same day you realize you need to change course. And if you happen to collect that information about your customers, you can even send them a message on their birthdays or anniversaries.
Segmenting Your Customer Databases
So if you can send your customers a message on their birthdays, it stands to reason that you can further customize your mailings, depending on what information you collect and how willing you are to personalize the message. You may wish to use your customers’ order history to customize your emails—and send out a special offer to people who haven’t purchased from you in a while. Or even better, you may wish to reward your best customers with a unique offering. If you can collect the demographics, the opportunities are limitless. You can send to: people with kids, people near 65, people in your ZIP code, etc. This is a great way to ensure that you’re putting your marketing message in front of the people most likely to act on it.
Track Every Move
With Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Vertical Response, and all the other major email service providers (ESPs), you can track how many people opened your email, how many people clicked your links, and which specific link within your email was clicked. Their analytics will also tell you how many people complained that your email was spam or unsubscribed (ouch!), or whether your email even made it into your recipient’s inbox at all. We recommend sending your customers to a landing page where you direct them toward a very specific action: call now, purchase your book, or sign up for your seminar, for example.
Experimentation
Lastly but not least—by all means, try something new! You can test out different messages—different subject lines—different graphics—and see how your audience responds. There is no need to stick to a bland template for years on end just because it fits your brand. Jonathan Adler sends out a wildly different email every day of the week; so does Kate Spade.
Need some inspiration from some great email newsletters? Try these!
Brain Pickings – A treasure trove of cross-disciplinary intersections, written by Maria Popova.
Call Me Ishmael – Strangers describe their favorite books, transcribed and delivered to your inbox. The intrigue!
The Daily GOOD – Wholeheartedly devoted to highlighting the good in the world, by GOOD Magazine co-founder Zach Frechette.
Need some help setting up an Email Service Provider? Getting your email list together? Setting up a template? We’re happy to help—shoot us an email!
