Why use an email marketing campaign?
Emails are a great way to get new customers and maintain a good relationship with your current customer base. 4 billion people use email, that’s a lot of potential new customers. And it’s easy to tailor emails for each person on your mail list. This direct contact with a personal touch can be more effective than a blanket post on social media. There are tons of services available for email marketing for small businesses to use, so it’s never been easier to get a stellar email marketing campaign going.
What’s right for you?
There are plenty of services and resources out there to help with email marketing (Mailchimp, Zoho Campaigns, Converkit, etc) but which one’s right for you? Start by asking yourself the following two questions:
How many emails are you sending? Services charge based either on the number of emails sent or the number of contacts in your list. If you want to send lots of emails to lots of people, check to make sure it’s the former.
What are you sending? Newsletters for current customers? Advertisements for new customers? Preview different services’ templates and see what you prefer. Some services also provide facebook ads if you want to integrate social media into your campaign.
Individuals’ privacy rights
GDPR, DPA and PECR can sound intimidating, but services make it easy so you don’t have to worry. They’ll take you through everything you need to make sure you comply with these laws. If you’re making a campaign independently, we’re working on a guide to help you through them.
Tips for your email marketing campaign
Protect your sender reputation – Don’t get marked as a spam sender because email providers will stop your emails from even reaching the recipient. Services will help you maintain your reputation and avoid spam filters.
Don’t send unnecessary emails – If it’s not relevant or too frequent people are more likely to unsubscribe or mark as spam.
Be concise – Waffle is annoying.
Simple subject line – What the email is about, nothing more, nothing less. Misleading clickbait will ruin any trust when the customer wastes time reading and doesn’t find what they thought they would.
Preview line – This will be seen in a list of emails right after the subject line. It could be used to show a personalised greeting or as an extension of the subject line, just don’t waste it.
Send interactive email – Get the customer involved and give them something to click on. This is what will turn an opened email into a sale.
Use data– Is there a more effective time to send emails? Wich emails have done well? Services will provide this sort of information so you can get the most out of each email.
Assessing your email marketing campaign
A big part of customer relationship management (CRM) is collecting data and using it to improve how you interact with customers. Services will handle all the data and analysis and give you all sorts of reports, insights, and recommendations. Here are a few definitions to ease you in:
A lead – Anyone showing an interest in your products or services.
Bounce rate – Emails that weren’t received.
Open rate – Out of those that were received, how many were opened?
Conversion rate – How many clicked a link in the email.
Unsubscribe rate – What it says on the tin.
Each service will have their own in-depth guides on how to get the most out of them. We hope this introduction has helped and your future email campaign will saves you time and money so you can focus on the service you provide.