Email Marketing For Small Business
If we were the betting type we’d wager that nearly every single one of your clients has an email account.
Not all of them will be on Facebook, less on Instagram or Twitter. But odds are they have an email address that they check regularly. In fact, there are more email users than Facebook and Twitter users combined. All that adds up to email being an excellent way for businesses to connect with their customers. We always encourage our clients to use email marketing for small business, to big brands! Learn why below.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is the act of sending an email from your business to your clients (or prospects) with marketing in mind. If you’ve ever signed up for an email newsletter, you’re signed up for an email marketing campaign. Email marketing opens a direct line of communication between you and your customer.
What Businesses Should Use Email Marketing Campaigns?
Every business can use email marketing campaigns. You probably get emails from the marketing team of big businesses on a daily basis. Email marketing often isn’t usually utilized as fully by smaller businesses that have more of a time and money crunch, but since email marketing is inexpensive to implement and can have a massive return on investment, even small businesses should make a plan to start marketing with email.
But Don’t People Just Delete Marketing Emails?
We get this question all the time. Sure, many marketing emails get deleted before they are opened. But even emails that are deleted have value because they keep your brand top of mind for potential customers. And when your subscriber is in a position to purchase your product or use your service, if your name has popped up in their inbox sparingly over the last few months, you’re more likely to be their first call.
What Content Should You Use In Email Marketing For Small Business?
Email marketing is great because it can be used for whatever you need. Generally, email marketing is used in four different ways:
- Product Announcement – If you have a new product coming out, send an email! Use the email to give your customers a good idea of what the new product offers, show off photos of the product, and link them to see the product on your website.
- Win-Back – A win back email should only be sent every once in a while. These are emails sent to previous clients that haven’t purchased from you in a while. Use these emails to remind them just how great your products are and to gently push for them to come back.
- Newsletter – A newsletter email is typically sent at a recurring timeframe (once a month or every two weeks at the most). This email is typically used to share business news including new products, blog posts you’ve written, events you’re hosting, and so on. Be sure to include a value for the reader in your newsletter. Including tips about new products or services that could benefit them or news about special events you’re holding show that you want to help your readers, and not just brag about your success.
- Survey – A survey email should be sent infrequently. These emails are used to survey your email subscribers to get their feedback. You can ask about anything from how frequently they purchase from you, new products they’d like to see from you, and so on. To incentivize people to fill out the survey, offer a coupon or a discount on their next purchase. Incentives not only encourage people to fill out your current survey, they can also help encourage readers to open more of your emails in the future.
How To Build Your Email List
Having lots of ideas for your first newsletter is great, but you need people to send them to first! How you go about building your email list can depend on your business. For instance, a local diner can offer a free birthday milkshake with email sign up, a law firm can offer a free digital download of an ebook for an email sign up. These would both work great individually but are unlikely to work if the two businesses switched tactics.
Our favorite ways businesses can build an email list:
- Offer a free webinar.
- Sign up for free digital download.
- Encourage sign up for exclusive deals.
- Give early access to new products.
- Sign up for regular coupons.
- Sign up to participate in an exclusive group (a book club, for example).
- Lead generation ads on Facebook.
Email Marketing Service Provider Option
For our business and our clients, we utilize MailChimp. MailChimp offers a great starter account to begin email marketing for small business. For free they allow you to build a list up to 2,000 users and send 12,000 emails per month (approximately 6 emails per month for a 2,000 user list). We love that MailChimp has easy to use email templates that allow you to drag and drop and make changes without needing a designer or coder.
At Get Online NOLA we’ve mastered digital marketing so you don’t have to. Sign up for a free strategy session to learn how we can guide your marketing efforts.