Let’s be honest, when you’re a new business owner, the last thing you probably want to do is spend time working on your marketing. After all, you have a day job to tend to – vendors to pay, customers to work with, and paychecks to sign.
However, if you’re not focusing on your marketing, you could soon find yourself without any customers coming through the door. After that, everything kind of falls downhill pretty quickly.
Sure, word-of-mouth advertising is excellent, but you can’t rely solely on existing customers to bring you new ones. You need to have a reliable, consistent approach to marketing if you want to grow your business.
Email marketing is a great way to attract new customers and reinvigorate past customers because it’s affordable, easy to execute, and simple to see the return on investment (ROI). Through this channel of marketing, you can build relationships with prospects, leads, and customers because you have the opportunity to speak directly to them at a time that works best for their schedules.
Now that the formalities are out of the way, let’s talk about how you can get started with your own email marketing campaigns. These six tips will guide you through your first (and hopefully many more!) email marketing endeavor.
1. Choose an Email Service Provider or Platform
As you investigate potential email service providers (ESPs), ask yourself these questions:
- Do you need a dedicated IP, or will a shared IP suffice?
- Can your ESP support your email list’s volume?
- What is the deliverability rate of your potential ESP?
- Will you have access to analytics to measure the successes and opportunities of your campaigns?
- Are there any automation and workflows you should be aware of?
Depending on your needs, your ESP could make the difference when you’re ready to launch your email marketing campaign. Some popular ESP choices are Klaviyo, MailChimp, HubSpot, Constant Contact, and others.
2. Add Contacts to the Right Segments
When you generate contacts – whether those come from family and friends, referrals, existing customers, leads from promos you’ve offered online, or something else – make sure you add those contacts to the right segments within your chosen CRM. You might sort them by demographics, geographical area, position in the sales funnel, past purchases, or website behavior. How you sort people will depend on your ultimate goal for your marketing efforts.
3. Set Up a Welcome Email
It is always a good idea to set up a welcome email to send to your subscribers in order to let them know that they have made the right decision in choosing your company. If possible, this email should include relevant information, such as customer service contact information and links to useful tutorials. While some customers may not open this email when it arrives in their inbox, many will be appreciative of the effort put into this correspondence and more likely to do business with your company in the future.
4. Pay Attention to Your Subject Lines and Messaging
You have a minimal window to grab readers’ attention. Subject lines with 50 characters or less often see a higher open rate, so don’t be too wordy. The key is to be accurate, concise, and to the point.
It’s important to acknowledge that people will judge your brand by your subject lines, so it’s best to test a few variations and analyze the results before sending a massive email out into the wild. The more compelling your subject line is, the more likely people will open your emails and click through to see what you’re offering.
5. Preview and Test
Although we already mentioned testing, this subject is important enough to get its own category.
A lot of work goes into an email campaign, and it is essential to preview your messages and test them before you send them out to make sure that all the links work properly and the design is up to your standards. The benefits of previewing and testing your emails are that you can see what kind of response rate it will get from your audience before actually sending the message out and make any changes before it is too late. Luckily, there are a number of tools available that will help you preview and test your email campaigns before sending them out to your subscribers.
6. Track Results
No email marketing campaign is complete without tracked results. You need to set a baseline before you begin and write down your goals to know what you’re trying to achieve. As you accumulate data, you can see how well (or poorly) your email campaign performs. This will allow you to pivot and still make a success of your efforts.
Partner With ZGM for Your Email Marketing Needs
For optimal email marketing strategies, you want to work with the best. Our team at Zero Gravity Marketing invites you to get in touch today to start your next email marketing campaign and knock your customers’ socks off!
