Don’t neglect your email list
You might think email marketing is an old, outdated form of promotion but nothing could be further from the truth! Used correctly, email marketing can be a secret weapon for small businesses, particularly if you are looking to generate growth and boost the success of your company. With email marketing, you can make your customers and clients feel like they are part of a secret club. You can make sure that they feel connected to your business and get those crucial repeat purchases. Of course, first, you need to know how to utilize this tool. That all begins with building and growing your email list. You can’t build a campaign if you have no one to email, can you?
Don’t Complicate Email Marketing Signups
You need to make sure that customers find it easy to join your mailing list. People often think that they shouldn’t advertise an email list signup option because it needs to be less intrusive and more subtle. While this makes some sense, they can’t sign up if they can’t find the subscribe form.
That’s why you should make sure that subscribe forms exist in various areas of your website, underneath and as part of different pieces of content. By doing this, you can make sure that people interacting with your site are finding these forms and will be enticed to sign up. You should certainly have a sign-up option on your home page, and it should be scattered throughout the content. It’s common for people who have low sign-up levels to find that they simply weren’t providing enough opportunities for users to get on the list.
Don’t stop when users leave your site either. People are always going to leave eventually, but that doesn’t mean they are done with your business. With a mailing list, you can keep them in the loop, and you have a contact option to keep them coming back. That’s why a quick popup using exit intent tech is the ultimate option to make sure that you do grow that email list.
Stop Missing Customers
One of the biggest benefits of email marketing and why it’s such a great tool is how it can help you grab those missed customers. Users can leave a website before purchasing for a variety of reasons. They may have become distracted, or they could have lost connection. It doesn’t matter because if they sign up for email marketing, you’ll still be able to connect with them. Over 60% of consumers will purchase after viewing an email.
Diversify Content
One of the biggest mistakes that you can make through email marketing is focusing on one form of content. Promotions are often the most popular choice for business owners and campaigners. It’s a smart idea to send customers promotions. Remember that secret club we mentioned? Special email promotions are one of the ways that you can make them feel part of the club. But if this is your only form of content, customers will quickly see your emails as junk. Or, they will assume what you’ve sent before they even open it, missing calls to action, links, and other goodies. Do you see the issue?
The solution is to offer everything from event info to product information and newsletters. You can even use emails for content marketing, offering users great articles that solve the issues they may have. As with anything, you need to make sure that your emails are seen to have value by individuals on the marketing list. If it’s not valuable, they could ignore the email or even worse, unsubscribe.
Divide Your Email Lists
Another mistake marketers often make is sending the same email out to everyone on the marketing list. Remember, one of the key concepts behind email marketing is to make the user feel special and as though they have a relationship with your business. This is difficult to achieve if they get the same blast email as everyone else.
There are lots of ways to divide or segment your list. For instance, you can separate those who have just joined and those who haven’t purchased in a while. Those who have just joined should be sent a welcome email, starting that connection while those who haven’t purchased should be sent a friendly reminder of why they bought a product or used a service from your company.
Alternatively, you can send an email to someone who has just made a purchase and one to someone who was recently browsing your website. You might think changing up your emails won’t have an impact on growth. But, a welcome email can produce 320 per cent more revenue for a website, compared with a promotional marketing email.
Give Them A Reason To Sign Up
Email marketing is a great way to push more people down the sales funnel and ensure that they return to your site. But how do you do this? Aside from offering them great content, how do you use email marketing to make sure that customers either commit to a purchase or come back for the second, third and fourth? The trick here is knowing what customers want. They want something for nothing or at least, the illusion of it.
If you offer your users an upgrade, fresh, exclusive content, a voucher or an ebook, they will sign up for your email marketing to gain access to these opportunities. Why? You are giving them something for free; by doing this, you are showing their value while also making them feel special or privileged. They will also be more likely to check, read and connect with future emails that you send them because you have already proven the value that you can offer. You will have them on the hook, and now you just need to continue providing them the goods with great content and incredible promotions.
What If You Don’t Have A Website?
You might not have a live website. Can email marketing still benefit you as a small business? Actually, yes it can and you can still use this tool. A brick-and-mortar store can use a basic sign-up sheet at the cash register to allow customers to sign up for exclusive deals, updates, news events and much more. Or, if you have an app, you can add a signup form there and create the same effect as using a form on your website. You could even create a simple landing page for your business that is just a sign-up form. It’s cheaper than running a full website, will provide you with a web presence and allow you to connect to those customers.
Get Those Shares
You are probably aware of how important shares online have become for every type of business. Getting content shared is one of the best ways to grow your brand and make sure that everyone is talking about your business online. Well, email marketing is another way that you can provide the content that will be shared and allow your brand to grow. As long as you are providing quality content through your email marketing, users will want to show it to friends, family members and other individuals within your target audience. You can make sure shares do happen by including calls to action, getting those users to forward the email and passing on important info or messages contained within.
Have The Staff To Cope
There is no use generating a whole load of new business enquiries or new orders if you don’t have the staff available to cope with that increased business. One way to ensure that you have enough hands on deck to cope with an influx of business is to make use of virtual assistants or virtual receptionists. The great thing about using virtual staff like the ones provided by Virtual Reception is that you only need to pay for what you use therefore if you are unsure as to how successful your email campaign is likely to be then virtual staff makes a lot of good sense.
We hope you see now just how incredible email marketing can be as a tool to grow your small business.
