How many emails have you received this week from brands you recently shopped from (online or in store)?
Email marketing is a very popular digital marketing tool being used by businesses all around the world. It's extremely popular because it is very cost efficient and it addresses customers who have already shopped from our business or trust us enough to share their contact details with us.
In this blog, we share a few tips to get started with email marketing.
1. Why email marketing?
First of all, is email marketing going to work for your business?
Are your customers buying on a regular basis products from your online or physical store?
Are your clients referring your products or services to their friends or family?
If you answered yes to those questions, then email marketing can work well for your business.
2. Build your database
If you decide to go ahead and include email marketing as one of your digital advertising tools, then you need to start building a database with all your customers and potential customers. We advise you create a database including their name, contact details, their email address (obviously), but also what product(s) they bought and when. It may not be important at first but in a few years, you will be able to send those frequent customers emails specifically created for them, to thank them for their regular purchase, offer then a frequent buyer discount or introduce them to your latest products.
Now be careful when creating that database. As I remind my students over and over again, we need to ensure we follow privacy laws in Australia (and abroad if your business sells overseas). Therefore people have to agree to have their contact details and other details collected and stored by your business. You'll also need to display a privacy policy on your website.
3. Get started with Email Marketing!
Start thinking of topics you want to communicate with your customers and potential customers, make a list. That will be very useful in future, you'll be able to create an email marketing calendar around the different topics and promotions you want to communicate.
The key is to email your customers regularly (but not too often!) so your brand is kept top-of-mind. Keep your emails interesting with educational information but not too long.
4. What email marketing platform should you use?
We advise to select an email marketing platform that will work for you and keep using the same, so you can build your database and reuse email marketing templates (maintaining consistency in your brand).
There are lots of options today, we like to work with Mailchimp. It's free until a certain number of database subscribers. It's got lots of different email marketing templates you can use. You can store your brand images and logo, link to your social media platforms. And it's providing a lot of data which is always very useful.
If you already work with a CMS such as Wix or Wordpress that offers an Email Marketing feature as part of their services, then we recommend using those email marketing features, so that your digital marketing is managed under a small number of platforms and integrated.
Now you've got all the elements sorted, you need to start writing your emails, ensure you add links to your website and social media platforms, with call to actions so those communications are worth-while. And don't neglect that subject line!
5. When should I send our business marketing emails?
This is a difficult question to answer as it will depend what your email marketing campaign is about, but also which industry you work in.
You may have noticed that you would have received a promotional email from a food platform (Ubereats, Menulog) at 5pm on a Friday night? That works well for them, but it may not work as well for you.
Put your thinking cap on: when would your customers most benefit from the promotional email you are about to send? when would they most likely to check their inbox?
And then like any other marketing and advertising campaigns, you'll need to try a few different things and track data until you find the most optimum day and time to send your emails.
If you need any help, don't hesitate to contact us. We can help you create email marketing campaigns, come up with an email marketing calendar and design email templates you can use and edit in future.
We hope you've enjoyed this blog. Thank you for reading!