Small businesses need to utilize all the means necessary to be able to succeed and establish a stable position on the market. New methods appear all the time. Some are more, some are less successful, but a strategy that has proven its value multiple times is email marketing. Creating a valuable and effective strategy is of the essence. Here are some things that you need to keep in mind.
Attract people to sign up
If you strive towards making the email marketing your central strategy to promote your business, you will need people to sign up for the email list. First, think about the problem that your customers want to resolve. Then, present them with the idea of the possible solutions as this may trigger the curiosity factor and increase your chance of getting a new member on your email list.
Make sure the sign-up box is somewhere where people can easily see it. Also, you might want to think about integration with the social media profiles, where people can instantly get all the information they need. Simplicity is usually what you need because people appreciate an easy approach. In fact, if you want to make things as easy as possible for both your company and your clients, you can use an email-to-SMS gateway that guarantees your emails are being read and don’t get lost amongst the inbox clutter. ClickSend makes it quite simple. Their gateway enables you to send emails and have them received as SMS texts. This is the perfect way to reach your clients, since text messaging has guaranteed open rates of 98%.
Give rewards
People love rewards! It’s in our nature. If something is free of charge and easy to get, we are there. Use this to your advantage. Offer new members a prize after they finish the sign-up process, such as a free ebook or a discount for the most popular products. This is usually all it takes to persuade someone to follow through, but make sure it is something that will be valuable and useful to your customers, otherwise their interest will disappear very fast.
Get familiar with the regulations
Law requires all businesses to provide a simple mechanism for unsubscribing and it is regulated by the Act called CAN-SPAM. If someone requests to unsubscribe, it is your duty to make it possible in the following ten days, if not instantly. In case you fail to comply with this regulation, you may end up paying a fine, which is certainly something you don’t want.
Learn from email marketing data
Don’t let your data go unnoticed. When you start running a small business, you may end up overwhelmed pretty soon with all kinds of demands, requests, problems and day to day issues. However, it is necessary to stop for a moment and focus on what’s important. Analyzing your email marketing data is the essence of achieving success. If you are not sure how to do that, you can always leave it to professionals, visit Yespo for more information.
Don’t forget social media
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are now our reality. Everyone has a profile on at least one of these platforms, which is why it’s necessary to establish a presence on all of them. The companies that realized in time that social media is here to stay and made it possible for their customers to reach them on these platforms profited significantly. Just the idea that the business owner dedicated enough attention to lay everything out for their customers, tells a lot about the approach and the future of the cooperation.
The customers will surely appreciate your effort to constantly inform them about all the new products, services, meet-ups or anything else that is important for your customers. Not only that, but this approach increases the chance that the customer will see something interesting that will inspire them to buy and probably even recommend your company to a friend or colleague. This significantly widens your network and the span of potential customers.
Keep it very simple
No one wants to be piled up with information. You must be aware of the habits your consumers have. Think about the average customers – they will probably check their email on the go while they are waiting for a bus, a meeting or a meal. They probably have just 5 minutes and they don’t want to spend it all on emails, so they will just open the emails, scroll through and move on to something else. If the information is laid out pretty clearly and without the use of long, hardly understandable formulations, you are on the right track. When you think about it, the biggest and most successful companies use short slogans that made them famous, so as Nike would say – Just do it! See, 3 words, but so effective.
Keep your emails regular
In order to be on someone’s mind when they need a service or a product, you need to have a schedule of sending emails, or they will completely forget about you. Send the emails weekly or monthly. Make sure you create the right strategy and keep the balance, so don’t get too pushy and annoying, but still be there when necessary. This is sometimes hard to achieve, but again, here comes the importance of data analysis – it can help greatly.
Provide quality content
Content is everything. If you don’t provide quality content, everything else won’t matter. You must give your customers the information that they need, packaged in an interesting way. If all you offer are empty promises, you will lose them just as fast as they signed-up. This will result in an enormous loss of time and resources.
Each of these steps is very important and its implementation requires time and dedication. It is easy to give up when obstacles appear, but all of them can be resolved with the right approach. If you think you are not skilled enough to execute the entire strategy, then delegating this task may be a wise choice. One thing is for sure – email marketing carries huge potential and shouldn’t be overlooked.
