All forms of marketing have their place to play in growing and building your business, social media seems to be today’s buzz word but building an ongoing relationship with your clients is key. Email marketing is not only one of the best ways to build a relationship with your clients but also is one of the founding parts to your marketing mix. “On average in 2009 every $1 spent on email marketing produced a return of $43.62” (Source: Brilliant Online Marketing by Alex Blyth).
Email can be implemented across all sizes of businesses and with different objectives, from selling a product or service, welcome new customers or encourage existing customers to take action.
Top 8 things to think about and keep in mind with Email Marketing:
- Plan, plan, plan: Ensure that your email marketing content is interesting, engaging and compliments other marketing activity. A plan will help you to coordinate your marketing communications.
- Clean data: Ensure that your data is clean and as up to date as possible ensuring the best response from your clients and that you comply with data protection legislation.
- Sign up process: Install a system for collecting email contact details from your website and incentivise your new prospective clients to give you their details. Generally a sign up on your brand website to your newsletter is a great start, featuring an incentive eg: bespoke offers or top tips and hints!
- Subject Line: Make the subject line as appealing as possible to increase your chances of your clients opening the email and take action. eg: “WIN a free piece of Stella and Dot jewellery!” Will probably gain more engagement rather than “Jewellery Available!”
- Deliver relevant content: Content is king! Is the new buzz-word across all forms of marketing, providing relevant content and information to your customers will encourage engagement. Try to encourage a two way conversation where possible and relevant.
- Work out the best time to send your emails: This will be part of your test and learn over time. The response of your clients will vary across the day and time of the week. eg: promoting a short break on a Wednesday evening or Thursday morning for the following weekend.
- Test, test, test: As with all forms of marketing, tracking, testing and refine creative, messaging and deployment date will be key to learning what works best for your business.
- Track your response: the beauty of email is that you can see an immediate reaction from your clients, delivery, open and click through rates tell you immediately how successful your campaign has been. It is affordable, you can personalize messages and closely track performance.
If you do need some marketing help, support or guidance then Sophie from Rimu Marketing is dedicated to helping small to medium size businesses in kick starting their marketing campaigns. If you need help in drafting, designing or deploying your email marketing campaign, please email: sophie@rimumarketing.co.uk to arrange your FREE 30-minute consultation!
We look forward to working with you and seeing your business flourish!
Sources: Chartered Institute of Marketing and “Brilliant Online Marketing” by Alex Blyth.
