Email Marketing for Your Business
Figuring out marketing for your company means you’re looking at a lot of options, all the time. You have social media accounts vying for your attention, paid ads, organic search, SEO best practices, and email campaigns. Different experts in different fields will try to tell you what they think you should do, and you feel like they might all be right…so how do you know who to listen to?
We’re not here to send you into a spiral by listing this all out - we just know it’s probably a familiar spiral to be in. We’ve even been in that spiral ourselves, and we’re a marketing agency. The options are simply overwhelming.
We’re not going to tell you which option to choose today. But we are going to share about one of our favorite options – email.
Maybe you still associate email with AOL in the dark ages of the internet, and you think about all of the emails you unsubscribe to constantly - you don't want that to be your story with your company in other people’s inboxes, right? We don’t want that either. Let’s talk about how to discern if email is the right platform for you, and how to use it well.
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The what of email marketing
Email is a powerful way to share your voice with your customers and say the most important things you want to communicate with them. Gathering an email list will be useless if you don’t have anything to share with your audience - in the same way that creating a social media account won’t do any good if you don’t use it. So first, decide - what do you most want to share with your readers?
Some ideas for this could be:
Educating your audience on common misconceptions about your product or offering
Letting your personal experience and authority come through - sharing stories and anecdotes that help grow their trust in you.
Providing simple, practical tips and a space for them to reply to you directly if they have a question or comment.
The why of email marketing
You may not check your email nearly as much as you scroll Instagram, but that doesn’t mean email campaigns are obsolete.
Actually, they’re far, far from that!
The magic of email is its consistency and permanency.
Of course people can still unsubscribe or just ignore your emails, but what sets email apart from your Instagram account, for example, is that you own your email address.
No matter how much we’ve come to depend on it, social media is still volatile. Email is more dependable than your Twitter account – er, X (see our point?).
You can’t suddenly lose your followers, have your account suspended, or any of those other scary things businesses experience with Meta or X. Your email address, your contacts, and your own content is much more secure within an email campaign.
The how of email marketing
Now that you know why email is a great tool to have in your back pocket, let’s talk about how to use it.
Utilizing email for your business is more than just manually sending emails once a month.
There’s a method and a process to doing this well - but don’t stress - it's doable!
The first step is collecting email addresses. Maybe you’ve already been doing this through an email service provider like Mailchimp or Flodesk. If you have, you’re already off to a great start. And if not? Your next step is to choose your favorite provider and get started.
One of the most useful ways to collect email addresses for your list is with a lead generator. A lead generator is a free resource you provide for your reader in exchange for their email address. This resource could be a quiz, downloadable pdf, or checklist - you want it to provide value so that they want to receive your emails.
The outcome of email marketing
We’re not the most data-crazy marketers out there, but we also know that tracking numbers is important for email marketing.
Our advice is to set KPIs for your email campaigns, so you can be prepared to have a general awareness of what you define as success. Then you can intentionally work toward growth and get off of the guessing game cycle.
At the end of the day, we hope that incorporating email marketing into your business’ strategy will help you become more connected to your audience, reach more customers, and have an outlet to share the elements of your business that you care about most.
Wanna chat more about email marketing? Reach out today - we’re always open to a conversation!
