Why is email marketing important?
There are several reasons why you should keep in contact with your clients and customers via email:
- People don’t return to your website regularly unless they can only access some special feature of your business there
- Your website needs ‘hits’ to boost its search engine ranking; emails articles that link to your site are a great way to generate hits
- Casual, informative, easy-to-read emails are one of the best ways to keep your customers engaged in your business
- Many of your customers may not use social networks like Facebook or Twitter
Even though email marketing has gotten a bad rap because of spam, how many times has an engaging title in your email inbox captured your curiosity enough to get you to open it? Consider email marketing as an important aspect of your outreach especially because direct mail and advertising costs are prohibitive.
How do you get started?
Mailchimp offers you a mailing list up to 2,000 names in a free account. You can upload your list to their site and then add a Subscription form to your site to add new subscribers. If your list is over 2,000 names, the pricing becomes comparable to Constant Contact. For a small business, the free Mailchimp account is an unbeatable bargain.
Here’s a link to a newsletter we help put together each month. Amazingly, every issue is chock full of newsy items even though this is a very small business. This is blogsy in its approach – the studio owner likes to include items she thinks her audience would find of interest – because she finds them interesting.
Here are some pointers for creating good emails & newsletters:
- Keep your articles short. 5 sentences is plenty unless you are conveying a lot of details, like where, when, who, etc.
- Feature your customers or clients. We all learn from each other, so tell a story about someone’s experience with your product or service.
- Tips about your services or products are great interest-generators. People appreciate information they can use.
- Lots of pictures! They are a great way to break up blocks of text. People love to see visuals to drive a point home, faces, beautiful landscapes, children and animals.
- Link to your website! Pull your readers over to your product or service, a registration form, or more details.This is a great way to increase your site’s traffic, a major factor in search engine ranking.
- Create a ‘call-to-action’, something you want the reader to do as a result of reading an article. People love to interact. Make sure your newsletter ends with something for the reader to do, such as get more information with a tipsheet, reviews, or a consumers checklist.
- Over time, you’ll develop certain features that you’ll include in every issue: in the example above, each issue has a quote about yoga, upcoming events and news about the yoga and the student community.
- And don’t think you need to produce a newsletter every single month. Bi-monthly or quarterly newsletters can be just as effective. Send your newsletter around a time that is strong for your business, like a holiday, or a seasonal change.
- Weekend mornings are the best time for your readers to receive email because they have the time to read in a relaxed way. So schedule the delivery accordingly.
We can help you put together an email campaign, too, so when you’re ready to pull it all together, contact us!
