If you’re having a hard time getting new customers to your store or website, using flyers and word of mouth probably isn’t enough.
Have you thought about using email marketing?
Email marketing is a way to reach out to potential customers through email. You can send newsletters, promotional offers, and other types of content to a list of subscribers.
One of the main benefits is that it’s a cost-effective way to reach a large number of people. You can also segment your email list, so you can send targeted messages to specific groups of customers. For example, if you have a sale coming up, you can send an email to just your VIP customers.
Email marketing is also a great way to improve customer loyalty. By sending regular newsletters and promotional offers, you can keep your business top of mind with your customers.
You can also use email marketing to nurture relationships with your customers, by sending personalised recommendations or thanking them for their business.
How to build an email list
First, you need to build a list of email addresses. You can do this by collecting emails from customers at your store, or by offering a sign-up form on your website.
If you’ve been trying to build an email list for a while and I’m barely getting any subscribers, don’t worry – you might not be doing something wrong. Building an email list takes time and effort.
Have you been offering something of value to your customers in exchange for their email addresses?
Offering small discounts like 10% discount on their next purchase, is probably not going to work.
You might want to consider offering something a bit more enticing. Maybe a free product or service, or access to exclusive content or deals.
You’ll also want to look at the different ways you collect email addresses.
There are a few different places you can collect email addresses from. You can have a sign-up form on your website, or you can ask for email addresses when customers make a purchase in your store. You can also use social media to promote your email list and encourage people to sign up.
Remember to always make it easy for people to sign up for your email list. The more steps it takes, the less likely people are to follow through.
Getting consent is important
It might be really exciting to start sending emails to your customers, but you’ll want to make sure you’re doing things ethically – and there’s numerous regulations and laws in different states and territories.
How do you make sure you have consent and an unsubscribe process?
It’s important to always get explicit consent from your customers before adding them to your email list and you need to respect your customers’ wishes by also giving the option to opt out of your emails if they want to.
You can do this by having a clear opt-in form on your website, or by asking for permission in person when collecting email addresses.
The unsubscribe process is just as important as the opt-in process. You want to make it easy for customers to unsubscribe if they no longer want to receive emails from you.
You must always include an unsubscribe link in the footer of your emails, and make sure it’s easy to find and use. The only exception to this rule is transactional emails, where you might be obligated to send them an email, such as a Tax Invoice or Receipt.
What happens if someone unsubscribes?
When someone unsubscribes, you should immediately remove them from your email list and stop sending them emails. It’s also a good idea to send a confirmation email letting them know that they have been unsubscribed.
Popular email marketing platforms manage this entire process for you, including automatically adding customers to Suppression Lists, so you don’t accidentally email them, so you can remain compliant without any concerns.
Building email templates
Once you have a list of email addresses, you can start creating email templates.
These are pre-designed templates that you can use to easily create professional-looking emails.
You can use email templates for newsletters, promotional offers, abandoned cart emails, and more.
How to create an email template
There are a few different ways you can create email templates.
You can use a tool like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, which have pre-designed templates that you can customize with your own branding and content.
You can also create your own templates from scratch using HTML and CSS.
What types of templates should you use?
There are a few different types of email templates you can use depending on your goals and the type of content you want to send.
It really depends on your goals and the type of content you want to send. Think about what you want to accomplish with your email marketing and choose a template that aligns with that.
You can also test different templates with A/B split testing and see which ones perform the best.
Here are a few examples:
- Newsletters: These are regular emails that you send to your subscribers to keep them up to date on your business, new products, or other news.
- Promotional emails: These are emails that you send to promote a specific product, sale, or event.
- Abandoned cart emails: These are emails that you send to customers who have added items to their online shopping cart, but haven’t completed the purchase.
- Welcome emails: These are emails that you send to new subscribers to thank them for signing up and introduce them to your business.
- Survey emails: These are emails that you send to gather feedback or opinions from your subscribers.
Using A/B Split testing
A/B split testing is a simple but powerful way to test different versions of your emails to see which one performs the best.
For example, you can test different subject lines, email content, or calls to action to see which one gets the highest open rate or conversion rate.
Most email marketing tools have a feature for A/B split testing.
You simply create two or more versions of your email and send them to a small group of your email list.
- Different subject lines might get more open rates
- Different email content and pictures might get more engagement
- Different button ‘Call To Action’ labels might get more click-through
- Different offers (10%, 20%, 30% discounts, etc) might get more sales
The platform will then track which version performs better and automatically send the winning version to the rest of your email list.
Best marketing platforms for small businesses
If you’re just getting started, we recommend these Email and Digital Marketing platforms:
- Mailchimp — Mailchimp helps small businesses do big things, with the right tools and guidance every step of the way.
- Moosend — The fastest path from email marketing to business growth.
- Sendinblue — Take your digital marketing to the next level.
- PipeDrive — Pipedrive is the easy-to-use, #1 user-rated CRM tool. Get more qualified leads and grow your business.
- Missinglettr — Missinglettr helps businesses automate their social media marketing. It creates a year’s worth of content from one blog post, and schedules it to post on social media for maximum reach.
- Kissmetrics — Kissmetrics is a powerful analytics and marketing platform that helps businesses track, analyse, and optimise their customer journey.
- Sellfy — Effortlessly create a beautiful store that stands out and represents your brand in a unique way.
- Crazy Egg — Use Crazy Egg to see what’s hot and what’s not, and to know what your web visitors are doing with tools, such as heatmaps, recordings, surveys, A/B testing & more.
- iContact — Grow your business with iContact’s easy-to-use marketing automation tools – create emails, manage contacts, and track results.
- Emercury — Discover the email marketing platform marketers use to reach, convert and retain their customers.
- Unbounce — Grow your relevance, leads, and sales with Unbounce. Use Unbounce to easily create and optimize landing pages for your small business and boost conversions with AI insights.
- Ontraport — CRM, sales and marketing software for small and mid-sized businesses.
- Pardot —
Pardot is a B2B marketing automation platform that helps marketers create more leads, generate more pipeline, and empower sales to close more deals. It provides powerful tools to create, deploy, and manage online marketing campaigns.
- LeadSquared — Complete Marketing Automation and CRM software for businesses. Organize your lead capture, lead management, sales management & analytics in one platform.
- Customer.io — Customer.io is an automated messaging platform for tech-savvy marketers who want more control and flexibility to craft and send data-driven emails, push notifications, and SMS messages.
- AB Tasty — Revolutionize brand and product experiences with AB Tasty: AI-powered experimentation & personalization, feature management and product optimization.
- Kajabi — Kajabi has everything you need to create, grow, and manage your knowledge and creator business. Start for free.
- Leadpages — Leadpages helps businesses create high-converting landing pages, pop-ups, and opt-in forms to grow their email list, generate leads, and increase sales. It’s easy to use and offers powerful features to help you get the most out of your online marketing.
- Constant Contact — Constant Contact is a marketing platform for small businesses. It helps businesses create emails, ads, and surveys to engage customers, grow their online presence, and measure success.
- ActiveCampaign — Visit our website to learn more.
- LeadFormix — LeadFormix is a marketing automation platform that helps businesses generate leads, track customer engagement, and measure ROI. It offers features such as lead scoring, email marketing, web analytics, and more.
- 20NINE CRM — An alternative to cumbersome CRM for small businesses. Manage clients, sales, communication & documents from the mobile and computer!
- Act-On — Act-On is a comprehensive campaign management platform that helps businesses create, manage, and measure campaigns across multiple channels. It provides tools to automate and optimize campaigns, track performance, and measure ROI.
- DataCaptive — Get insightful B2B database with updated contact information of key decision-makers. Reach ideal prospects and connect to close faster deals.
- Factoreal — Be a Pro at E-commerce Marketing and convert every online interaction into a sale.
- ClickFunnels — ClickFunnels gives you everything you need to market, sell, and deliver your products and services online! Without having to hire or rely on a tech team!
- Kartra — Next generation all-in-one platform to run your online business
- Campaign Monitor — Campaign Monitor gives you everything you need to run beautifully-designed, professional email marketing campaigns to grow your business.
- GetResponse — No matter your level of expertise, we have a solution for you. At GetResponse, it’s email marketing done right. Start your free account today!
- Moda — Grow your eCommerce business with high-converting email and SMS, backed by data superpowers!