Posted by 
Archived in 
Email services provider Campaigner recently surveyed 259 small businesses of which 46% said they used email marketing and 36% plan to start in the next year. So am I impressed by these findings? Does nearly half already using email sound a lot? Well, to be honest, it should be a lot more.
If only 36% plan on starting email marketing campaigns that leaves 18% who’ll continue to miss out on one of the best marketing tools around. Whether you’re a landscape gardener or an international retailer, email is a great tool for relationship building, attracting people to your website and notching up sales.
So for those 18% of small businesses who don’t see the need to use email (and anybody else’s who’d like some advice) here are a few tried and tested types of email marketing:
Informational
Arguably the most effective use of email (well, we certainly think so) is as a relationship building tool.
Sending out a newsletter packed with useful advice, product tips and industry insight is a great way of building rapport and trust in your brand, and, dare I say it, ‘thought leadership’. These typically receive high open rates and click throughs (but only if you’re providing great content, of course).
Newsletters can be quite time consuming to put together. But the beauty is that you can reuse the content in other marketing materials, such as your website’s blog (here at bda we do it the other way round).
Inspirational or entertaining
Consider sharing customer success stories and case studies of how your product/service has helped solve a problem. If you can write it in an interesting way (rather than like a backslapping press release) you can show off your expertise and reflect your business’ personality at the same time.
Promotion
Another popular way of using email is as a quick fire sales tool.
Whether it’s announcing a new product or offering a discount on an old one, email can be used to quickly spread awareness on your special offers. Email is also great for sending out coupons, which you can track to gauge the success of your campaign.
However, with many people weary of the amount of salesy emails they receive these days, response rates for promotional emails are typically low. You can, however, dramatically increase response if you can personalise your messages.
Personalisation power
Thanks to modern one-to-one marketing techniques, the days of carpet bombing the same message are over. Now it’s possible to personalise every email for each recipient.
And I don’t just mean changing the name. An email’s content can be customised based on all sorts of criteria, such as the recipient’s company’s size, their industry, purchase history and any other nugget of info stored in your database.
You can then create a flexible template in which you can drop customised content with a single mouse click. Personalising emails means you can cross-sell offers based on a customer’s purchase history, deliver case studies relevant to their industry and increase the value offering of each message.
With email fast becoming a mainstream marketing tool, it’s vital to ensure your messages are more relevant and valuable than your competitors. Personalisation (and great content) is what can make your emails ‘must reads’, rather than banished to the junk folder.
Offer a mixture of the above
So which type of email do you think is best? Well, they all certainly have their merits. But the best strategy is to mix all three.
Email marketing can take time to bear fruit. But one of its benefits is you can track every open, click through and sale. Watching how people respond to your messages helps you to identify what they’re interested in and which types of emails work best. You can then adjust your campaign accordingly.
Golden Rule = Get permission. Don’t spam
But before you run off to start penning your first email, whatever you do don’t buy a list of email addresses. Sending unsolicited email is akin to door-to-door selling in many people’s eyes. As well as being blocked or deleted, your message risks being flagged as spam, which will leave your credibility and campaign in tatters.
So do the honourable thing and start your own list by asking for email addresses at every opportunity. It might take longer to build your database. But you’ll have a list of permission based leads keen to hear what you have to say.
_______________________________
BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region