Here at New Harvest, we have been working on an overhaul of our email newsletter, and it has got me thinking about Email Marketing and how it can be used to help improve one’s business. I wanted to introduce you to the general ideas and techniques behind Email Marketing, to give you a good idea of how it can help you.
Make Sure Your Customers Don’t Forget You
If your company has a website, you’re getting web traffic. You may have a few pageviews a day, or you may have millions. In any case, many of the people who visit your site have a quick look and leave, without buying, requesting a quote, emailing you, or anything.
The promise of Email Marketing is that it may help you hold on to a few of those leads. Sure, not everyone is going to sign up for your emails. But it’s quick, free, and easy (At least it should be. Make sure yours is!). For those that do sign up, you now have the opportunity to turn that person, who ordinarily would’ve forgotten about your site and your company, into someone who remembers you, trusts you, and eventually buys from you.
Let Your Customers Like You: Build a Relationship
Photo Credit: SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget
It’s not as easy as getting an email address and sending them a sales offer. There is a trend you may have noticed happening in sales online. Authentic and useful communications make ALL the difference. Users are cynical when it comes to spending their hard-earned money online, and they’re far from stupid. They prefer to deal with companies who provide value, and treat them like people. So you’ve got to do just that.
What can you offer with your Email Marketing communications? Even if you’re just putting together a regular newsletter updating people with what you’ve been up to, try to make it interesting and useful! No one needs to know that you switched to a new brand of coffee at the office, and no one cares. Are you offering new products or services that your clients or customers-to-be would possibly like? Let ’em know! Have you hired new employees who bring with them abilities that your contacts might like to take advantage of? Perfect. You don’t have to overthink it, but stay away from boring, and don’t feel like you have to tell them every little thing that’s happened since the last email.
As your subscribers become accustomed to receiving your emails, filled with interesting and useful tidbits of information, they’ll begin to feel like they know what you’re about, and that they can trust your business. They’ll become more open to sales offers, and you can start to turn these subscribers into paying customers! Don’t be afraid to ask for that sale from time to time. Just don’t forget the useful stuff!
Email Marketing Is Not a Magic Bullet
Setting up an Email Marketing system is not a guarantee of success. It’s not usually a case of “if you build it, they will come”. For one, the more people on you subscription list, the higher your chance for sales. In order to get more people on your list, you may need to drive more traffic to your site, or to a specific “landing page” that advertises the mailing list and encourages users to sign up. You can also try to promoting your mailing list amongst your existing clients, family, friends and social networks. If you’ve got no one reading your emails, it doesn’t matter how good your content is.
Photo Credit: janetgalore
Another danger with Email Marketing is spam. You’ve got to make your content as good as possible to beat the spam filters. If anything you’re offering could be construed as spammy, the higher the chances you’ll be caught in the spam filter net, or your messages will be manually reported and you’ll lose that lead. Even if your content is good, sometimes you’ll lose a message to an overzealous spam filter. Sometimes the only way around this is to make your emails so good that your recipients will miss your content if it doesn’t show up in their inbox, or mark you as a “safe sender” to make sure they get your messages.
Get Started: Email Marketing Services
If you want to give Email Marketing a try, it would be wise to use a third-party service to send your emails and manage your list. There are many of these services, and they make it much easier to control what you send, how and when you send it, and who you’re sending it to.
As I mentioned above, we’ve been working on our own email communications here at New Harvest and we are using MailChimp to get the job done. We’ve created a really nice custom designed email template, as well as sign up forms and the like. Plus we can manage all our subscribers from the same site. It’s really neat!
Here are some other popular Email Marketing services:
- Aweber
- Constant Contact
We Can Help
We have the experience and talent to put together gorgeous, professional Email Marketing campaigns. If you need help putting together your Email Marketing strategy, contact us today and we can get you set up with a strategy that works for you.
What are your thoughts about Email Marketing? The subject of Email Marketing is quite deep and this is just an introduction to the topic. Do you have any questions? Ask us in the comments and we can get into more detail!
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