Starting a business can be overwhelming. From writing a business plan, setting prices to hiring employees – it’s all a learning experience. New business owners will find that nothing is static, as the selling arena changes daily. The only constants that remain are to maintain and increase the customer base, which ultimately increases sales. The best marketing tool that’s both adaptive and cost-effective and does both is email.
But you’re a new business, starting with a negligible customer base how do you use email to increase your sales?
List building, (collecting addresses), is the easy part. “Permission” based list building, the preferred way, can take time. As noted, growing viable permission based- active member lists is the hardest part of email marketing.
Start by asking your customers for their email address and follow the “29 Ways to Collect Email Addresses for Your Business”
As you busily collect those addresses, consider which email service provider to work with.
Selecting the right email service provider (ESP) for your new business can be just as overwhelming as starting a business. There are many online “experts” who are more than happy to point you in the direction of their favorite Email Service Provider. Dundee Internet is no different, in that respect. We would love to have your business but realize the choice you make may be based on recommendations, price, referral credits or it just sounds cheap enough.
Dundee Internet exists to solve your email marketing problems and challenges, and we are great at it. While it is true there’s a lot of similarities between ESPs there are also many differences.
Differences with Dundee include the ability to speak to the owner and our famous one-to-one technical support and consulting. We are available day, night, holidays, weekends, anytime you need us. We have online manuals, easy- to -follow tutorials, wizards, and great informational blogs.
Once you select an ESP, are you going to hire an email marketing team or do this yourself? If you hire a team, the process is handed off to those not as invested in your new company. This is a good strategy for later when you grow. In the meantime, as a new business owner, you will probably do this yourself.
After you check off securing an email provider, and have a decent amount of addresses, and maybe some prospects (never buy or rent email addresses) your first email should be a well-crafted Welcome letter.
When someone subscribes to your email list, there are three reasons to acknowledge their new membership with a timely well thought out Welcome email; (1) to thank your new member for joining your list, (2) set their future expectations by explaining the purpose of your email list and (3) most importantly – to start a subscriber relationship with them.
The look and feel of your actual email campaign depends on you. Do you want it to Mirror your website, using similar images, colors and fonts? Or do you want to use a drop and drag approach which typically limits image size and font choices? Either way, a template is a great way to start, it will help you keep focused on your upcoming campaigns, saves time as the format is already there, and with Dundee, you can keep the entire list of previous mailings, with images and links for reference.
Before your first mailing, plan and define your email marketing campaign strategy and goals. This will help guide the directions of your campaign and make it easier to measure the success of your efforts.
When you decide on your subject matter, for example, Free Seeds to the first 25 customers on Saturday, June 10th, follow with content that is straightforward, not to long and informative.
The subject matter is important. Follow your newsletter purpose as stated in your Welcome letter, don’t go off on a tangent, “and now something completely different”
Some of your readers may only have time to read your Subject Line when they receive your newsletter. They may set it aside to read later: an explicit Subject Line makes it easy to locate your letter in an inbox. But because there are no perfect Subject Lines, consider testing your email to find the one that receives more opens.
A/B testing is a method of comparing different versions of the parts of an email against each other to determine which one performs better. A Hypothesis can be generated based on how you could improve your campaigns, set up your test, and send. In theory, this testing method gives the user solid evidence of what performs well and what does not. Through testing, you can get a clear idea of your customer’s preferences which will help you create the type of email they will read and act on.
As your list grows and it will, you can segment your list to send different mailings using the one list of subscribers. Explore ways to use triggered mailings (typically used in conjunction with some action performed by an email recipient such as a visit to a website or a purchase) and transactional emails, an email sent in response to an action such as “Thank You For Your Purchase” when a purchase has been made.
And then there are reports which will tell you how successful your campaigns are. Most ESP’s, have deliverability reports with graphs and links, showing opens, refer a friend and more.
New and established businesses use the best marketing tool that’s both adaptive and cost- effective that does both is email.
Need assistance? Contact info@dundee.net
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