What the heck is email marketing?
Email marketing is simply the method of marketing in which you reach out to your audience by email.
I’ve mentioned this in a previous article. Even with all the SEO and online marketing you could do, email is still valuable when it comes to inbound engagement of audience and converting that audience into customers.
How to get started capturing website visitor emails
An email signup form should be prominently placed on your website. Multiple locations is best. This can be directly inside an articles or blog posts. The sidebar of your blog, or in the footer of your site also offer good visibility. You can even add a signup form inside a pop-up or slide-in window.
Asking your visitors to give you their email address through a signup form isn’t easy. In return, you must provide them with something of value. The simplest way to do this is with letting them know of your latest website content via regular email updates/newsletters.
The best content to provide in email updates and how frequently these occur is up to you. I suggest sending these out updates at least once a month, and at most, a couple times per week.
Then, ensure your signup form directly connects to a subscriber list on an email marketing service, such as MailChimp (which I highly recommend and have been using almost exclusively with all my online business clients since 2008).
Need help setting up your email signup form and list? I can do it!
Once you grow a list of email subscribers, that list requires care and feeding. Don’t just collect emails now without a campaign plan, and stow away your list for some special announcement. That is worthless these days, for the amount of emails people no doubt already receive. Most likely they already get emails from your competition!
Engaging your audience with email marketing is key to keeping your brand memorable when it comes to your products or services.
A few simple efforts for engaging your audience via email
Obviously, eCommerce site owners will use email newsletters to offer product & service promotions. You an also use it to communicate value (educational articles) and entertainment to keep folks interested. This can include things such as hashtag campaigns people can help spread online.
Another popular thing lately is photo contests. You encourage customers to post their photos with testimonials. They can also simply showcase visually how they use your products or services. Be sure to ask them to tag your brand or company name along with your hashtag for the campaign. These types of campaigns are popular on services like Instagram and Facebook, for spreading awareness of your brands services and products.
At the very basic level, I’d recommend setting up a blog with articles about what your company is up to, etc. Commit to posting an article once per month, then set up an email template that has RSS feed capability, to detect when your site has new posts.
Your aim should be at the very least, to come up with a 12-month calendar of blogs campaigns to offer a combination of all of the above.
To start, I’d recommend committing to create at least one blog post per month. Blogs can serve as evergreen content as long as what you outline isn’t dated. Post links to these blogs regularly to social networks where your audience can be found.
On Twitter or Instagram? Make sure to include links to those in your email updates, so your audience can engage with you on your social profiles, as well.
That’s it! I hope you find these tips valuable and encourage you to get started with email marketing on your own.
Do you have great ideas for engagement that you’d incorporate into your own emails, but need help executing them? Let’s talk.
Or maybe you just need a Mailchimp expert to set up your first campaign template? Help is just a click away
