This week we’ve been doing a fair bit on email marketing so we thought let’s give a quick refresh on how it can help your business even in todays climate.
What is email marketing?
The average office worker sends around 120 emails per day so you can appreciate how important emails have become in our daily life (business and personal).
Email marketing is incredibly popular with 93% of B2B marketers using it for their campaigns.
Essentially it involves sending an email to all of your contacts (or people who have signed up to your mailing list for example).
The great thing is that emails are like flyers, but they can contain links to your products, show flashy images and animations, auto-populate with user specific data and much more.
If you are serious about updating your marketing then email marketing is really a great tool to use.
Pros and Cons of email Marketing
Pros:
- It’s cheap
- It’s fast
- You can write an email and send it in minutes
- You can add lots of fancy things like animations, links and more
- You can do ‘mail-merges’ which pull in user specific info for each person
- You can get great stats on who has opened, viewed and clicked on your emails
- Whether you send it to one person or thousands, there’s no extra effort
Cons:
- Sometimes emails end up in junk mail or get blocked
- People don’t like getting spam
- You need a good quality mailing list
Overall, there are more pros than cons in using email marketing.
The fact that it is so cheap and you can choose who you email means it’s a very powerful way of getting your message out to potential customers.
Tips for email Marketing
Grow your marketing list: This is so important. It could be people who have signed up to your newsletter, or it could be a list of customers. The quality of your list determines the response you will get.
Email something of value: Many marketers offer freebies (lead magnets) in return for people joining their list. It could be a pdf, or a discount code.
Keep it simple: People are so busy and won’t bother reading something long.
Be professional: You can be friendly, but remain professional and be clear about why you are getting in touch.
Pick the right time to send your emails: Just like with a social media post timing is crucial, eg. Compare Monday morning with Friday afternoon.
For some extra excellent tips check out this and this.
Using Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the most well known email marketing providers out there.
With their software you can build your marketing list, create campaigns, design emails and send them out.
If you have up to 2000 subscribers it’s free (at the time of writing) so there is no reason why not to use them!
A few other cool things you can do with Mailchimp:
- Connect it with your ecommerce store and send out automated emails and notifications (for example if someone leaves without buying anything).
- Set up a landing page – really easy and quickly in order to capture email addresses.
- Create welcome emails so when someone joins your list you can send them a message or even better give them a freebie.
- Google retargeting ads, done through Mailchimp which will help you show an ad through Google’s Display Network starting from $7/day.
There are many other options out there such as ActiveCampaign, Aweber and Mailpoet for WordPress.
We find Mailchimp is easy to use, has good deliverability and their recent automations and updates really add a lot of extra value.
Mailchimp training courses in the UK
If you are thinking of using Mailchimp but need a helping hand why not join one of our training courses?
These courses are great for people who want to send out marketing emails and learn how to do it themselves.
Courses can be held across the UK including Birmingham, London, Manchester, Basingstoke, Surrey, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Swansea, Portsmouth and Brighton, as well as online to suit you.
Help with your email Marketing
If you are interested in getting your companies email marketing going speak to us and we can guide you further.