Out of all the ways that you can market your business one of the most effective also happens to be one of the least sexy and often neglected. Email marketing is incredibly effective, has been for some time but you will never hear people give presentations about how many email conversions they had with the vast majority of people sticking to more trendy topics like Twitter this and Facebook pages that. You don’t often hear about Obama’s email lists helping to mobilize voters or how Apple use regular emails to massively stimulate sales. Its strange that in a world obsessed with social media and communicating with your customers that the biggest communication tool of the last 20 years rarely gets a mention. If I walked in to a random room of 100 people I would be very surprised if 98 of the 100 didn’t use email on a regular basis. That same room would probably feature a quarter of people on Facebook and less than 10 on Twitter but we are preached at from all angles about the power of communicating with your customers on Twitter by all sorts of experts. Don’t get me wrong as Twitter and Facebook have a massive roll to play in your overall marketing and communications strategy but I wanted to look at why so many people shun email and show you what services we use to get our email message across…

The stigma

A lot of us think about email marketing as something that is just spam and we delete it instantly but that is mostly because the vast majority of emails that are sent out are just marketing junk mail. People trying to give you the hard sell. The really effective email newsletters are few and far between but when done correctly they are highly effective and engage the customer by providing additional content that is different to what you find online. I am subscribed to some amazing food newsletters that send me weekly recipes and cooking tips but they don’t come at me with the hard sell. I more often than not end up clicking through to the website and browsing recipes where upon I might actually buy something or indirectly give them some advertising spend. The key is about providing value and offering your readers something of real value rather than a hard sell.

Building A Good List

I could go out and buy an emailing list in the morning for 10,000 people but there really is no value in that approach. What you need to try and do is build up a list of people who are relevant to your business, interested in what you do and hopefully have bought or engaged with you in the past. If you are attracting email sign ups through your site try and encourage people to sign up by offering something of value like free content, advice or discounted products. You may also want to try and build your list offline by creating competitions or encouraging users to subscribe via the oldest form of technology which is a simple paper and pen. Some of the most successful mailing lists I have ever seen have been developed by small businesses at events like trade shows and when selling direct to the customer face to face. What you want is a highly targeted large mailing list that you build up over time.

How To Design Your Email

Getting the look and feel of you email right is incredibly important as the biggest problem most people have is that they send something out that looks like a 3 year old designed it. This is understandable as most people who are in business that doesn’t do most of it’s work online simply wouldn’t have the budget to have something professionally designed. There is a happy medium which is Toddle. I discovered this option over a year ago and use it for most of our emails. It is incredibly simply to use and require little or no technical knowledge. You can knock something together with images and text in less that 10 minutes that would pass off as a professionally designed email. The service is free for your first couple of emails so you can go in and have a play around with it before you have to commit.

How To Mange Your Lists

Once your email is designed you will need to start mailing it out to people (we go once a month but this part is totally up to you and what is relevant for your business) and although there are hundreds of solutions out there I have always found that Mailchimp is the best. The key is that it is very simple to manage and just like Toddle you need very little technical expertise to get your email lists send out and the fact that it provides excellent list management and full reporting is an added bonus. You can try the service for free with some restrictions and if you like it and want to continue with it then you have the option of upgrading to unlock more features.

Create Value And Drive Sales

Email newsletters will not be for every business as they just might not be effective but you should have a look at your business and see if there is somewhere where you can add value to your customers experience and draw them back in to help sell more products. The key is finding the right message and you will have to look at your company carefully and decide what works for you but one word of caution is that a bad email newsletter that is spammy will do as much damage to you as it will good. Take time to think about your email strategy and remember that nearly every single one of your customers are using email on a daily basis so it would be wise to start getting your strategy in place today

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