15 Mar Your E-mail List is an Asset (Part 1 of 2)
You do use email as part of your marketing strategy, don’t you? If you don’t have an active email marketing campaign, you are missing out on one of the most cost-effective ways for your business to build its customer base. Email is inexpensive to send, easy to create and simple to customize. Even if you are already using email to reach your customers, we would like to show you some ways to make it work even better for your company in this two-part series. Optimizing your email marketing strategy can create a big impact on your sales with only a little effort.
Your list of email subscribers is one of your business’ greatest assets. It should be a list of current, past and future customers who have actively shared their contact information with you because they want to engage with your products and services. Continually adding subscribers to this list helps your business grow. In this first post, we are going to look at how to grow your list; in the next one, we will show ways in which you can most effectively communicate with the members of that list.
First, make sure that every one of your email newsletters or promotions has a prominent forwarding or sharing feature. Many of your customers do business with people who will also be interested in your company. In fact, often they know better than you can who needs your products. Making it easy for them to share your newsletter will bring you new subscribers, all of whom are potential customers. If you’re marketing directly to consumers, the same thing applies. Crafters love to share their projects and stash. If your store just got a shipment of that hard-to-find yarn by the hot indie dyer, most of your customers would be willing to share that information with their knitting and crocheting friends who are looking for that yarn. (Others wouldn’t want anyone else to get any, but they will buy most of it themselves, so you still win.) In the same vein, make sure that each of your newsletters has a link to a landing page on your website. You should have a subscription button on that landing page or a pop-up subscription window. You may want to include links to past issues of your newsletter so that potential subscribers can get an idea of what they will receive when they sign up for it.
Second, use your email list – but don’t abuse it! There is a difference between a newsletter and a promotion. Both are valuable strategies for email marketing, but they each have different uses. A newsletter offers its audience content of value to them, whether it’s tips or an e-book or even a coupon. In return, your company and your products come before their eyes on a regular basis weekly, monthly or quarterly. A promotion is an email designed specifically to sell your product. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but a balance between the two types of content keeps your subscribers happy and looking forward to hearing from you. Too much of one type or the other will have your audience clicking the “Unsubscribe” button. And on that note, let them – continuing to send email to people who don’t want it is called SPAM, and it can alienate the very people you’re trying to reach.
You also want to consider your frequency of mailing. Daily is definitely too much, but quarterly may be too little. A good rule may be to send a newsletter when you actually have news, but you can define news as loosely as you need to keep your company in contact with its customers.
Third, use your other social media channels to add to your email newsletter subscription list. You can have a Call to Action (CTA) button on your Facebook page to get new subscribers and you may choose to pay to promote your CTA to your audience. Those promotions, which show up in the feed of your followers, have been working well for many of our clients. Capturing email contact information on multiple platforms lets your company reach different segments of your potential market, often with little overlap.
Once you have your email audience, you need to reach out with content that will matter to them, presented in an easy and attractive format. Choosing a third-party email marketing platform will make composing and sending your email marketing campaigns a breeze. In our next post, we will look at some tricks of email composition and mailing that will help make sure your messages get read.
You can download our FREE No-Nonsense Guide to Newsletters. Stay tuned for part two coming next week!
If you find our tips useful, imagine how much more you would get from a full consultation. Contact Leanne@stitchcraftmarketing.com for more information about how we can help you develop a successful email marketing strategy.
No Comments