If you are not keeping in touch with your clients, or have a pile of business cards from networking events and exhibitions, it is time to give some serious consideration to email marketing.
Email marketing is an extremely cost effective way of getting more business from your existing clients and from new contacts. By sending useful information in personally addressed emails, you can build a relationship with them and keep you business front of mind, so that next time they need to purchase, it will be from you.
Many companies think that the emails just get deleted – but just think how much it will cost when they bin your expensive leaflet! You may think response rates are low for both emails and postal mailings – below 10% and often under 1% – but if you consider the cost of adverts, then you can see that emailing is very cost effective.
So here are 6 simple steps to effective email marketing:
Step 1 – use a reputable email marketing service
When companies try email marketing, they often use email software such as Microsoft Outlook, with a PDF of their brochure attached. This gives them no feedback on who is opening which parts of their email and brochure. Worse, they risk being reported as Spammers, and their business email address getting blacklisted by ISPs. An email marketing service such as Mail Chimp or Constant Contact will cost you very little, and will avoid all these problems.
Step 2 – build your own list
You probably already have the basis of a great list – your existing contacts and clients. If you don’t have a system for storing these, start by putting all their contact details in a spreadsheet, using a separate column for first name, last name, company name, address, post code and email address.
Step 3 – develop relevant and useful email content
The trick to improving response rates is to personalise the content and get the reader’s attention quickly. Offer something they want and is useful – and strangely this may not initially be your products or services! It could be something free – perhaps a buying guide, or an update on the latest trends.
Step 4 – write an attention grabbing headline
The headline will be critical in getting the reader’s attention, so give as much thought as you can to this. Remember that words like Free tend to get your email labelled as Spam, and good email software will test your email text to check that it is not likely to happen.
Step 5 – sort your list into groups
Segmenting your list, so that you have a different list for each customer group, will help you send more relevant information to your contacts, and improve your response rate. If you ever buy from Amazon, you will be familiar with this – each email they send you features products related to those you have bought in the past – books by the same author, toys aimed at the same age group etc…
Step 6 – analyse the results and act on them
Using an email marketing service will enable you to see which contact has clicked on which parts of your email. You can then use this information to follow up with targeted emails or phone calls (but probably best not to mention that you can see what they have clicked on – it can look like stalking!). You can also use it to test different styles and content, to see what gives the best response rates.
You can keep building your list – remember to ask for permission to email, and have an opt out message on your emails too.
If you would like to learn more about Mailchimp, look out for our beginners Mailchimp workshops – more details here
Author: Beryl Pettitt