When readers enter the beginning of your sales funnel with an email sign-up, what welcomes them in? Are they sent a run-of-the-mill welcome message or just handed the next copy of the e-newsletter? Here are four tips on how to market a small business through effective emails to your new leads.
Personalizing Your List
When Tusker Trail wanted to build their emailing list, they created a Facebook campaign that asked followers to vote for their favorite destination and enter their email address for a chance to win a trip. They then sent a 5-part mini series of tailored emails to each participant to welcome then into the company by educating them on their dream location.
Offering a Discount
One of the warmest ways to welcome a new email recipient (as well as grow your list) is to offer a special coupon on sign-up. Micheals, Crazy8, Banana Republic and other companies have offered 20% off coupons to those who sign up. Use a specialized one-time-use code to ensure your deal doesn’t get posted for just anyone to use.
Use Professional (and Compressed) Images
Bright, colorful and sharp images will make your emails impact your audience. Make sure you are effectively compressing your images so that it doesn’t take users a long time to download your emails. Compressed images are not visually smaller, but compacted in the saving process to take up less space. Images and graphics should be saved smaller than 1MB to keep load times reasonable. Kissmetrics reported:
- 73% of mobile internet users said they’ve encountered content that took too long to load
- 65% of users said they would abandon the page if it took more than 15 seconds to load.
- 52% of online shoppers said loading times were important to their brand loyalty
Immediate Opt-In
Don’t get marked as spam! Make sure you tell users to expect an opt-in welcome message to confirm their email address, and then send it right away! With a second confirmation, you help ensure your audience wants your emails and won’t be marking them as spam.
Consistent, But Varied
I receive emails from Carters, OshKosh and The Children’s Place and they all show the same flaws. The emails offer the same kinds of sales, the same repetitive marketing efforts, the same types of new product launch emails and the same coupons, year round. Just once, it would be nice to have some kind of supportive content that wasn’t centered around their product sales. I’ve started ignoring their emails until I need something for my kids. While this works on one hand – the brands stay at the forefront of my mind – it fails on the other – I know their patterns and have started tuning them out to resist purchase temptation. To keep readers engaged, post on a consistent basis, but change up your content to cover different benefits to the reader.
I also get emails from Woot, who has a great marketing team and stays on top of their email creativity. They offer funny content that makes me want to read through, even if I don’t plan on making a purchase. Their emails are varied and include more than just product promotion – although, there is certainly plenty of that.
As you formulate your email strategies, try to be unique, warm and genuine. Your readers will thank you.
Writer Bio: Alethea M is a writer at WriterAccess, covering topics that range from marketing and design to photography and chiropractic care. She loves pulling out interesting facts from her corporate blogging research to impress friends at dinner parties.
