How to be a Successful Email Marketer from Scratch

by Pat | Nov 9, 2018 |

Collect Email Addresses

You just opened a small Bakery downtown.

Starting from Scratch

Your marketing includes a Facebook business page, you tweet, and post on Instagram.  E-commerce is part of your website for internet orders, but business isn’t booming.  You need another cost-effective way to attract and keep new customers.  Your Marketing Plan includes Email campaigns which are notably ideal for your business type plus extremely cost-effective.  You want to start this as soon as possible. However, you do not have a list of subscribers to work with.

The groundwork for any marketing plan starts with the well-defined customer

These are the people you want to reach with email.  Your Marketing plan helps identify the hypothetical ideal prospect and customer, what they look like, what industry are they in, male or female, old or young and so forth.  After you define your ideal customer, seek out those likeminded prospects – people who with the aptitude to turn into loyal customers.
Your ideal customer is most likely the people who already shop in your store or signed onto your website to look or buy your goods. These people are the ideal candidates for email marketing.

Start a membership list with your ideal candidates, your current customers, ask for their email address.  Collect email addresses at all the shopping touch points; in-person purchases, online shopping, craft shows, farmer markets, and vendor shows. Invite them to your join your list anytime you have an opportunity to do so.

Who is your ideal customer?

Create sign-up forms that collect the data you need.  Share your email sign-up forms in your store, on your website, on your Facebook account, and at special events.

Once you add your customer’s email address to your members’ list, send a welcome letter and include a link to their profile page.

Profile Pages

With Dundee (aurea) ListManager member profile forms, list members can see and edit their collected information.  This is a useful way for members to change their email address or other demographic information all in one place. For example, ask if they interested in holiday baking or cake decorating classes or how many emails they want to receive in a month.  Ask anything that will be useful for you and your customer, because with this information, sending personalized one to one email messages is so much easier.

Send with Segments

Segment your contacts into different selling criteria: Use the information you gather to create segment categories for:

• People who only buy goods during the holidays
• That only purchasing with an offered discount
• Shoppers who routinely order cakes
• Pie lovers
• Bargain hunters

Segments allow you to send targeted, relevant personalized email that will be read most times than not.  Next time you have a cake sale you’ll have a list of people who have indicated they are interested when your cakes go on sale.  Don’t forget to include people who shop online.

Reports

Any time you mail a campaign to your entire list or send specialized emails to list segments make it a habit to review your mailing reports.

Dundee (aurea) ListManager offers extensive reporting on your mailings and membership.  There are six categories of pre-built reports offered.

1. Mailing
2. Members
3. Website
4. Purchases
5. Interest
6. Surveys

If the report you need is not available: you can create your own custom report. Additionally, there is a built-in sales cycle map and a general map of all charts that allow you to access all reports more quickly

As you obtain new subscribers, Welcome them to your list.  Set up a succession of emails that follow the welcome letter, introduce them to your company, your products even an invitation to update their profile page.  Use the automation feature with ListManager to keep you new subscribers informed of what they can expect as a new member of your list.

Transactional Emails

Personalize all those transactional emails when you sell items, confirm reservations or just about anything you need to send an automatic reply. Send transactional emails to list members and non-list members with Dundee Internet ListManager.   Because these types of emails are shown to have the highest open rates of any email type include a call-to-action in your transactional message.

Write, Send and Grow!