Email Marketing Basics for Creative Business Owners
So you keep hearing the following statement, “As a business you should probably get around to sending out some ‘professional’ email.” And you may be wondering where the heck you should start or if it is even worth your time.
Email Marketing has some powerful benefits, but to be successful it has to be well thought out and carefully managed. Today, we will cover some of the benefits, how and where to get started and then the ideal anatomy for your newsletter.
The Benefits are Hard to Deny
Build Know, Like & Trust
By sending branded, beautiful emails your potential client or customer continues to get to know you better. They generally like you more. And they definitely are more likely to trust your business. Find out how to turn that trust into a sale here.
Boost Your Sales
Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (source). Hello, why wouldn’t you nurture them then? That’s like throwing away free money.
Stay Top of Mind
How many times have you stumbled upon a gold mind only to forget the name, lose the address or fail to save it for later? Trust me, people who come across you will accidentally close a tab, won’t bookmark the page or restart their computer in the middle of reading no matter how awesome they think you are. If you can manage to capture people’s information then they are way more likely to remember just how amazing you are. Email marketing is one of the only ways to guarantee your entire audience will be exposed to you. Social media is not guaranteed and posting a blog post all by itself is like a shot in the dark. Email marketing forces your name to show up in their inbox again and again!
How to Get Started
Increase Traffic
As much as we would like to assume people magically show up on our email lists the first step to any marketing tactic is to grow your exposure. You can organically increase traffic by creating killer content on a blog (you stopped to read this didn’t you).
Here are some surefire ways to increase traffic on your website. And this includes some super simple SEO tactics to help push your company to the top of search engine results.
Setting Up the Forms
Before you begin collecting email addresses, you need a way to capture this information. Here is a basic step-by-step tutorial to set up your forms in Mailchimp.
Enticing Someone To Sign-Up
Do you willy nilly give out your personal information? Absolutely not! You have to trust someone, and they have to give you a pretty legit reason for you to hand over that coveted email address. The secret sauce to having someone sign-up is using a super valuable opt-in. You can learn all about what goes into one here.
Anatomy of the Ideal Newsletter
So you finally have a list of people dying to hear more from you because you already gave them some of your juiciest knowledge. But what do you send them? What goes in your “newsletter” of sorts?
Personalize & Customize
Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14%, and conversion rates by 10% (source). Consider adding someone’s name to your subject line and addressing them in your email. In Mailchimp you simply do this by adding the tag *|FNAME|* which refers to that field on your list based on the email address.
Tell a Story
People want to connect with other people. They get plenty of “ads” in their inbox from big box brands. Don’t spam them. Act like they are a part of your life, you have them over for a cup of coffee and you want to tell them a story. Connect it back to something going on in your life or business.
Call to Action
Give your readers something to do. Perhaps you challenge them. Maybe you ask them to read something. Go and sign up. You can even ask them to buy (don’t do this every time or you will wear out your welcome). Always end your emails with a call to action.
Extras
It is completely appropriate to throw in some extras at the bottom of your email. Consider adding some of the follow items.
Blog Posts – What is your newest content you don’t want them to miss?
Social Media – Where do you like to hang out online?
Promoting Products or Services – What is available to them right now?
