In part 2 of our Email Marketing Series Kelly and I talk about how business owners can save a lot of time and get great results with email automation. Enjoy!
Your email vision and routine just makes a huge impact on your success and before you even send out your first email decide on a schedule you are going to follow, the value you are going to add, the sales emails you are going to send and also how often you are going to send emails to your clients. You can also look at things like segmenting your list. It is so important to lay the foundations before you even send out your first email. Another thing is to inspire yourself by looking at the potential out there, if you don’t know the potential in something it is often hard to reach the full potential of a marketing technique.
Kelly, when looking at small business owners that are time short and they really need to see results for their email marketing, what routines do you recommend that they put in place?
The first thing that springs to mind is certainly using automation. Automating your email marketing is a fantastic way to save time because once you have spent the time to set it up it just ticks away in the background and it doesn’t require any manual action so automation is something I certainly recommend for people that are time poor. Automated emails get really good results too.
Automated emails can be anything from a welcome email when someone subscribes to your email list right through to really complex lead nurturing campaigns that take your customers on a journey to try and convert them to be a paying customer. Speaking of welcome emails … it is often an area that I see overlooked by small business owners and it’s a shame because we know for a fact that welcome emails generally have a much higher open rate than other emails, so that means that this welcome email is a great place to start and you can set a really good first impression if you do welcome emails well. I certainly recommend to anyone who doesn’t have a welcome email to set one up today because it doesn’t take long and the results are really worth it.
We have a client down in Sydney called Hipkids, and they do welcome emails really well. Basically they are a small online store, they are very little business, and they have seen some fantastic results with email marketing. Firstly, they set up a web form on their website and they offer 15% off as a coupon to get people to sign up to their email list. So, as I mentioned earlier they are using an incentive to get people to sign up and get them in the door and then they have automated the process, so instantly a welcome email gets sent to the customer that includes a coupon code. They have seen these emails get open rates of over 70% on average – which is way above industry standards and a fantastic result. What’s even more important is that they have actually then seen these emails boost sales by up to 15% so that is a huge result for a small business and it is certainly something that I recommend people consider doing as part of their email marketing strategy.
One of the benefits that small business owners have is the personal approach that they can take and one of my recommendations that I make to my clients is to always make that first email very personable and relatable. It’s definitely one of the emails that has the highest open rates and that’s just gold time for you to build relationship with your audience, so don’t be scared to add a photograph of yourself, a little information about yourself behind the scenes and really make it personable and relatable.
Another thing to think about here is to really set expectations for your customers, so as Mara mentioned earlier you already know what your email campaign routine is going to be, you know how frequently you are going to send emails, you know what sort of information your emails are going to contain, so it is really important that they know what they are signing up to and they know to receive an email from you once a week or once a month or every day or whatever your routine might be, but at least then they are prepared and they know what to look forward to.
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