Your business has taken off but you need to reach more people and make a name for yourself. It's time to start your first email marketing campaign. Before you even begin to think about the content of your emails, the promotions you are going to propose to your customers or the design to adopt, you must start with something much simpler: the mailing list.
1. Concentrate on your target
Nowadays marketing is becoming increasingly narrowly focused. Before you start any e-mail campaign you need to define who you are going to address. To determine your audience, you can answer a few simple questions: How old are the people I want to attract, will my product or service appeal to men or women (or both), where do my potential clients live (large or small town), what are their interests? After answering these questions, you can better adapt your messages to your target audience.
2. Create customized content
The second step to make towards your target is the quality content that will attract their attention. Creating a blog for example is a very popular and very successful way to increase the number of visits of your site. Do not forget to include a button that would allow those who are interested in your content to subscribe to your newsletter and to hear from you more often. This could be a first step to your contact list. Social networks, being an effective way that allows you to easily reach your customers, can also be a starting point in creating your mailing list. Asking users to subscribe to your newsletter in order to display some of your articles is a little bit more aggressive method that you can use. However, we advise you to reserve this option for content of greater importance and quality. Annual reports, market analyzes, computer graphics or survey results are typically the kind of information that takes a lot of effort and for which your customers will be able to give you their contact information in exchange.
3. Be transparent
Explain to Internet users why do you need their email address. What kind of information will they receive and how often. Give them the opportunity to choose the topics that interest them most and show them that subscribing is beneficial for both sides. In this way your audience will trust you more and you will increase the reputation of your business.
4. Adopt the two-step registration process
Once the user has filled in all the necessary fields for subscription, send him an email requesting his confirmation. In this way you will avoid the future problems of deliverability of your emails due to a typing error or a false address.
5. Manage your lists separately
As we said before, marketing is becoming more and more targeted. It is therefore quite normal that a customer who is interested in a particular product line will not want to receive emails about all the other products and services you offer. Giving Internet users the option to choose the topics that interest them as well as the frequency they want to receive news from you means that you also need to respect their preferences.
6. Respect the law
Do not forget to add the unsubscribe option to all your emails. It is an ethical but also a legal issue. Another mistake to avoid is the purchase of databases. According to the legislation in many countries in Europe you do not have the right to send emails without the prior agreement of the recipient. Moreover, even from a marketing point of view, it is better to build your databases little by little but by integrating only potential customers. The enormous e-mailing lists do no good if they send your emails to people who are not interested in your business.
7. Analyze your results
MailStronger offers you a complete analysis of each e-mailing campaign, take advantage of it! This will help you to better understand your audience, to better adapt the content, the form and the frequency of your messages according to their activity. Once you know your customers well enough you’d be able to effectively target them and to propose well adapted special offers to subscribers.
8. Be patient
There are no miracle recipes that will boost your sales overnight. Arm yourself with patience and be persistent. Analyze your mistakes thoroughly and success should not be long.
