In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent the first email and a tremendous amount of emails later we can all recall that addictive “You’ve got mail.” sound. It’s one of those pieces of internet history we will never forget.
In today’s fast paced and social media driven environment where Tweets, Likes, Shares & Follows are just part of our daily bread and butter, emails have not become any less important. In fact, because of all the hustle and bustle of online media marketing, sending an email directly to someone’s inbox is often still the most direct way to communicate your message with a customer.
This makes it even more important for you, as a business owner, to understand the value in creating catchy, well written and well thought out emails to help you connect’s take a moment to talk about “Why it is important to email market”. Email Marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools because it’s easy, effective, and inexpensive.
It allows you to reach a large number of consumers at a rate of almost nothing per message. This makes it a more cost effective than using traditional marketing channels like print, TV or radio.
It can be used thoughtfully to build loyalty and trust in your brand. Email marketing is important for building relationships with prospects, leads, current customers, and even past customers because it gives you a chance to speak directly to them, in their inbox, at a time that is convenient for them.
Be friendly and personable. You are not invading their space if you have chosen your message and your recipient wisely.
A study last year from Exacttarget reports that 91% of people use their smartphones to access their email. This compared to 75% of the people who use their smartphones for social networking. Not using email as part of your marketing strategy means you are missing out on a channel that a majority of your customer uses!
And here is the good news: It is not hard and & this post will give you some great tips on “How to get your email marketing done right!”
Let me introduce you to the email service provider we use at Marketing Fuel and Creatively Disruptive; MailChimp.
MailChimp has been around since 2001 and to this date, over 12 million people send around 1 billion emails to clients, customers, and other interested parties every day.
One of the great things we love about MailChimp is the free offering for businesses who have less than 2,000 people on their email list, it just seems fair and as a web-based application that works in most web browsers, you don’t need to download or install any software on your computer.
The great thing about MailChimp is that the campaign builder walks you through building a campaign, step by step. When it’s time to design your campaign, if you’re not using an uploaded template, you’ll find a variety of basic email layouts you can customise easily without HTML knowledge.
As your business grows and your email marketing becomes more complex Mailchimp offers paid services to scale with your success which is important right? After all we market to grow so ensuring that the tools we use can grow with us is an important factor to consider.
You can create a free account at http://mailchimp.com and we’d love to hear your feedback or questions on your experience with Mailchimp.
TIP: When you signup check out their support, the guides and tutorials are simply amazing.
We came to the conclusion that Email marketing is still relevant and here is the good news: It doesn’t need to be overwhelming!
MailChimp is very easy to “get the hang of” and their library is full of amazing “how to” guides. But I’m sure the feasible options and easy to use interface makes MailChimp very self explanatory to use, to this date MailChimp is my favourite email marketing software on the market. MailChimp allows you to easily create newsletters of different types and provides simple options for sharing them on social networks such as Twitter or Facebook, making it your own personal platform for publishing your newsletter. Build a list of the people whom you want to market your products to, and save the list for use later on and create custom templates for your products so you don’t have to rewrite your emails over and over again.
I also love that MailChimp allows you to track your results so you can check the responses that you receive from your clients e.g. open rates, moved to spam and other actions taken by the email recipient.
This gives you a better idea about how you can improve your emails for the future in order to get more positive responses.
So what’s stopping you? Not sending out emails yet? I think you are running out of excuses 😉 If you have any questions on how to get most out of MailChimp or just a general query about the tool, we are here to help 🙂
Just flick us a line in the comments below or message us!