Email Marketing For Small Business

Hello, welcome to this week’s episode all about how to market your business with emails, so grab your favourite drink and let’s get into it.

Email marketing is something I haven’t really utilised in my business until the beginning of this year. I had collected email addresses and stored them, but never used them. It wasn’t until I start thinking about this more that I realised how wrong that was. I had people wanting to hear from me and signing up to my newsletter, but I wasn’t providing them with the service they were expecting.

At the beginning of this year, I really wanted to think about how I could use email marketing to share the various resources that I create and provide value to other business owners. I felt like I could help businesses with their marketing, sharing a more streamlined approach and that the way to communicate this was to share it with my email audience.

Email marketing is such a powerful tool, if you do it right you will have people who advocate for your brand, people who will buy from you, people who will trust you and people who will want to share your work with others. 

An email list is so much more than a collection of email addresses. It is the ability to talk to somebody directly, something that is actually quite hard to do in this modern age of marketing. Social media is full of people selling things and full of people giving advice. I am no different that is exactly what I do, but when I send my email every two weeks to my subscribers I make sure that I offer them value because they have chosen to subscribe with me.

So if you want to build an email, list here are my tips…

Use an email service provider

One thing you need to be really aware of is that you need to be GDPR complicit. Meaning you have to follow certain rules about how you email people and who you email. The email service providers will ensure that you don’t fall foul of this by offering opt-outs of every email you send and by making sure that you only sign up people who have agreed to be on your list. That is the very basics, there is a lot more to consider here but as long as you take advice from your email service provider you shouldn’t have issues with GDPR.

An email service provider is also great because it holds all your email addresses for you and allows you to send emails to them. It also allows you to design it and determine when it’s sent. Some of them have really slick automation tools, that means you can provide daily service updates or daily emails without having to actually go in and email them yourself every day.

I have tried Mail Chimp and really loved how good it was for sending beautiful looking emails. I liked its drag and drop functionality and the fact that you could pretty much do anything with its template. It is a really sophisticated way of designing a beautiful looking email. They also have a really great free version which means you can send emails and build a list without any cost attached to it.

Other people, I know really like Mailerlite. It has really similar functionality to a lot of the big email service providers. They also have a really good free option and are worth looking into.

I have recently moved over to ConvertKit because I wanted to be able to use downloadable lead magnets, I’ll go into this a bit more later. I really like how ConvertKit works it is very user friendly, offers automation and excellent tools for sending things like a welcome email, without actually having to send them. This is part of their paid service but in my opinion has been worthwhile, because I have gained so many extra subscribers. I mainly decided to start paying for the ConvertKit service because I wanted to offer free Email courses and the way to do that easily is to have an automated email service provider.

Use a lead magnet to attract subscribers

Using a lead magnet can be really beneficial when trying to attract subscribers. Giving up your email address for no incentive is usually not something a customer will do unless they really value you or trust you as a person. This obviously will provide organic growth to your email list but it can be a lot slower. I would recommend having a variety of lead magnets that work with your business.

Lead magnets that you can consider using in your business could be

• a resource guide,
• a care guide so if you sell a product you could have a free downloadable care guide on how to look after it
• a checklist to do with a product or service that you offer
• case studies on how to build a brand or how to do you certain tasks or activities
• a how-to guide

and

• a template that people can use to manage their business flow and services

These are just a few ideas and as you start thinking about this you will realise there are so many things you could offer as a free download to incentivise subscribers.

Offer them a unique product or discount

So another way to get people to subscribe to your mailing list might be to offer them a unique product only for subscribers or to offer them a discount to sign up. 

I can’t tell you how many companies I’ve signed up to for a 10% discount. Discounting might not be part of your strategy so only consider it if you think it is worthwhile. And if you feel like discounting isn’t part of your strategy maybe consider offering something unique to them instead.

So what do you do with them when you have them on your list

well, first of all, make sure you send a welcome email it’s just a really nice way to make people feel appreciated and give them the opportunity to connect with your brand. 

I would suggest including links to places that they can go find other resources. If they’ve downloaded a lead magnet, link to where they can follow you on various social media platforms. You could also include any helpful or useful advice. If you’re using a mailing service that offers the ability to tag your customers or subscribers you could also add buttons or links for them to click, in order to find out what they are interested in.

Really successful mailing campaigns work if you understand what the person who is subscribing wants. Finding out other information on your subscribers by offering downloads or surveys will help you to know what to send them in future. This is really specialised email marketing which works well for more expensive brands or bespoke brands and can really make a customer feel valued.

Next, you need to decide how often you’re going to send your newsletter. I’ve chosen to send my moxie mail every two weeks. I did this because I felt like every week was too much to be in somebody’s inbox and too much work for me to do in my business. I wanted to offer value when I was sending emails and not for it to become a tick box exercise on my behalf. It might be your only way of doing successful marketing so you might want to do it every week and you might be able to offer that value every week. That is a decision that you need to make for your business. 

It is generally considered not the done thing to send one once a month just because it tends to be too far between them and people forget about you. That said I have two or three monthly emails that come through from various people that I actually look forward to and are full of value. The fact that they come every month means I look forward to them, so you need to design what works for your business. If you’re going to send an email that is full of value once a month then people will start to look forward to it. I think my main point here is to make your email marketing full of value.

Keep your subscribers happy

There are a number of ways to do this I would suggest offering them preferential rates, early access to things or discounts that other people don’t get. 

I would also suggest every now and again ask them to take part in a survey. Actually, ask them what they want to hear from you. Give them a voice in that community so that they can have an impact on what they see in their inbox. Again if you have a sophisticated email providing service you can set up tags for when people click various links, so it would be very easy to be able to find out what people are wanting to see and hear even if they didn’t fill out a survey.

Subject lines

what you write in your subject line is definitely the thing that makes people open your email. Some viewers might open your email because they know your email address and they want to hear from you. But a lot of people will open an email based on what it says is inside. We don’t want clickbait and misleading subject lines because that just brings mistrust and people are more likely to unsubscribe.

I find emojis work because they make your subject line stand out. If you describe what is actually in the email with a call to action type style, people will generally open your email. 

Again if you have an email service provider and you send it via them you will be able to see who opened it and who clicked on various links, that information is really valuable. A lot of email service providers will show you which bit of your subject line will be shown. This is important because some inboxes only show a certain amount of characters. It’s worth looking at the preview, so you can see what you’re subscriber is seeing when they receive your email.

So the takeaway this week is to

1. use an email service provider, and research which one is right for your business. Not every business will need to use the same email service provider, so do a bit of research.
2. Build your list using an incentive.
3. Send a welcome email and try and automate this so it happens as soon as people sign up.
4. Decide how often you’re going to send your monthly mail out.
5. Design your email so that your subject line converts people.
6. Use emojis.
7. I hope you found that useful, if you want to chat some more get in touch, my details are in the show notes, I’m here to help.

Thank you so much for listening to the moxie brand academy podcast 

If you want more head over to moxieva.co.uk/blog, where you’ll find guides and downloads and if you want to continue the conversation head over to @moxieva on Instagram.