Email marketing for small businesses and new starts
Why it’s worth considering trying email marketing
If you are a new start business or a small business, then it’s definitely worth considering email marketing as part of your marketing activities.
What’s great about using email marketing is that it’s generally pretty easy to get started with and if you are a small business then chances are you’ve got a million and one things to do and time is always tight.
Modern email marketing software has lots of features that really save you time. One of the big ones is automation, any decent software will let you set up automated chains of emails to go out at timed intervals.
This is great, because it means that you can set up all of your marketing activity when you have the time to do it - so as you get busier and your time becomes more stretched, it means that your marketing sends are going out as you had previously instructed. So, no matter howe busy you get, your marketing still goes out.
This is a real plus, as it avoids the common pitfall for small businesses of marketing ceasing when you get busy. It helps to avoid peaks and troughs the make life hard for anyone running a business with limited access to resources.
How easy is it to do?
Modern software makes it really easy to get started quickly, most decent software nowadays is cloud based, this means you can just log straight in online and get to work - with no downloads or complicated set-ups required.
It’s pretty easy to get started without any prior experience, email marketing software nowadays has been around for quite some time. This means over the years it has become quite refined and focused around providing lots of great features with quite a shallow learning curve.
In the old days, designing something for email marketing involved knowing your way around web coding. Now, all of this is handled behind the scenes for you, you can create really professional looking designs by quite simply dragging and dropping your content into a wire framed page.
Using a modular box system, you can drag your logo in to place, perhaps try it in different locations, then quite simply type your text as you would in Microsoft word for example.
Also, if you want to add some more visual elements to your design, you may want to add some supporting images. Modern software such as Email Blaster has an integrated library of royalty free stock images - containing millions of professional photographs and images.
How successful is it?
The great thing about email marketing is that your software will give you all of the tools required to make your broadcasts very successful indeed.
Making sure that you email reaches your recipients is vital - this means avoiding the junk filter, if your recipients aren’t seeing your email, then they won’t convert into enquiries and sales. Your email marketing software will have an inbuilt spam checker, an app such as this will run thousands of checks on your mailer before you schedule it to send.
This app will give you a full breakdown of how inbox friendly it is and advise you of any areas that you may need to tweak to make it as inbox friendly as possible. This is an invaluable tool and really will help maximise the exposure of your send.
In order to fine tune your marketing for maximum conversions, you may need to make some changes to what you are sending - this could be changes to the visuals, subject header, call to action or your body text.
Email marketing analytics make this tuning process really easy with campaign analytics. After you’ve sent your lovingly crafted mailer, analytics will show you how people are engaging with what you are sending. You can see such key information as how many people have read it, or clicked on your links, or unsubscribed.
This is an incredibly powerful set of information to have access to, it means that you can make changes to your future sends, you can try different things and see how your viewers engage with these. Through this process, you can really see some great boosts to your sales conversions.
Using analytics, you can also try split testing, this means testing two different versions of your mailer to small sample lists of recipients. Via analytics, you can then see which is the most successful - and this market tested version can then be sent out to all of your subscribers
How do you build lists of contacts to email
The big question that most new start or small businesses ask is “how do I get lists of email addresses” - the temptation is often to go out and purchase a list from someone selling data. It’s always best to avoid this though as these lists are typically not qualified and padded out with dead addresses and duplicates. They really don’t work for email marketing and are best left well alone.
There are lots of ways that you can use to generate your own quality lists of recipients. Email marketing is great at attracting repeat business form existing customers or prospects, so the first port of call is to have a good look through anyone that your business has interacted with previously. These could be previous customers or people that may have enquired but not bought yet.
So go through everything you have and get up to date email addresses for everybody - this will be an excellent start for you.
You can also use social media, Follow and friend request other business that fit the demographic for a potential customer of yours. You can then post useful and helpful business related info on your feeds and run special offers for people that want to join your list.
By creative use of social media - you can quickly generate really good lists of qualified opted in email addresses. Offer your follows good reasons to join your list and they will.
Will it fit with other forms of marketing?
Email marketing sits very will indeed within your overall marketing mix. It can be used to both lend support and be supported by other channels.
For example, if you are running an advert in a magazine, you can enter the email address of any sales leads that you get into your automated chains of emails. This is a really great way of staying in contact with people who may not have bought from your original magazine advert.
Email marketing really helps to build trust with these people, and most importantly remaining on their radar so that when they are ready - your company name is in their inbox.
As well as traditional forms of marketing - email marketing fits really well with social media also. Not only can social media be used for collecting data, but decent email marketing software can also be used to auto post social media updates and copies of your campaigns.
Decent software, such as email blaster will sync automatically with your key social media feeds. This means that when you send your email marketing out - the software will also automatically post a copy of this to your social media feeds. This is great for really maximising your spread.
Summary
So, as we’ve looked at, email marketing is perfect for new starts and small businesses. It’s quick and easy to use, fits in great with other marketing channels that you might be using - and most importantly with automation, it frees up your time to be dealing with those all to important sales enquiries.
If you are a new start or small business, then we’d love you to try email blaster. It’s quick and easy to open an account sand you’ll be up and running in minutes. Plus, as we are UK based, we are at the end of the phone if you need us.
Thanks for watching and good luck with your email marketing.
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