Businesses like yours send out emails to customers/clients all the time. You might have hundreds or even thousands of email addresses on file. But are you using the ability to connect with those people to your company’s best advantage?
There are lots of ways to “touch” a customer via email: newsletters, special incentives, coupons and white papers come to mind. It’s likely that a contact who is interested in getting a white paper doesn’t care about coupons. You may want to give your current customers one incentive but offer past customers a different offer.
By letting you call out different groups and adding the same person to more than one group, email services such as Constant Contact, Mail Chimp or Emma allow you to manage your database without investing a lot of time. (You can import data from Outlook, Excel and other programs; you don’t need to re-enter data!)
As with any marketing effort, you first need to define the audiences and objectives. Do you want to promote a service or product? Do you want to inform or share advice? Do you want to build or cement a relationship? Knowing these answers will drive the type of emails you send and how often you send them. Communicate too seldom and you won’t get noticed. Send out emails too often and/or to the wrong audience and your customers will unsubscribe.
Strategies may be fine-tuned by accessing reports that track data like bounces, opens and click-throughs. Armed with this kind of information, you can see trends such as the best day of the week and the best time of day to send the emails. A report can also show you the email addresses that unsubscribed. You’ll also be in compliance with the Federal CAN SPAM Act, which mandates that a sender give the receiver a way to opt out of future mailings.
Email service software allows you to use a custom-designed template (VIA created our own) or you can choose one from their library. You can also include icons that make it easy for your email recipients to share your correspondence on their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks.
By now, we hope you are thinking about ways to connect with your customers by using email marketing. If you want help to get started or would like to discuss strategy, content writing or a custom template, get in touch with us.
