“Hi, Mr. Sandberg, it’s Janet from Tony’s Lobster and Steak House, I just wanted to give you a quick call and thank you for your business and let you know that for Mother’s Day we are serving a very special brunch with all our house specialties. We are also giving all moms a small bouquet of flowers. If you want me to reserve you a spot, I can do it right now. Just let me know. Okay great. We will see you then.”
You call all your customers a couple times a month and let them know what’s going on, right?!
We may wish we could, but it’s impractical. Who has the time, and, what’s the chance we would actually reach them and have the opportunity to speak with them?
This is why email marketing is a must for any size business.
When you first get on the computer at the beginning of the day, what do you check first? If you are like the majority of people, you check your email first. So, instead of a phone call, email is the best way to reach your customers and know you are going to ‘catch them at home,’ as well as be able to connect with many people at one time.
While many companies spend a lot of money on marketing to get a new customer, it gets really expensive if you don’t turn those new customers into returning ones. There’s a lot of competition out there and email gives you the ability to nudge the customers to come in again.
There are other valuable marketing options out there, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram but, email is king for these four reasons:
Ownership
You own your email list and you decide who sees it. You may not realize that with social media you do not have control of which of your followers actually sees your post. Essentially you are leasing your followers, not owning them. In fact, on average only 6% of your fans see anything you post on your Facebook feed. Why? You are competing for real estate on Facebook. At any given time millions of posts are being posted on Facebook. The algorithm must decide what people will see on their timeline. And the rules are constantly changing as to what affects the chances that your post is seen. Facebook is a for-profit business. They want to control how many of your fans see your posts so that you will decide to spend money and boost your posts. You are advertising on their platform and they want to be paid for it.
With email, you are in the driver’s seat. Your message is sent right to your customers’ inboxes and you have control of what time it makes it there. With the average email user checking their email 7 times a day, you are pretty much guaranteed it will at least be seen.
Learning Curve
How many of you have ever sent an email and got a response? How many of you get a response from your social media campaigns? More than an occasional like, comment, or click through? Very few people do social media in a way that gets engagement or get people to take action. But you already know how to send an email and get people to respond. Statistically, email has between a 50-100 percent higher open rate than social media posts. Plus, platforms such as Constant Contact, MailChimp or Fishbowl have templates that make it easy to create branded, professional emails.
Easy Referrals
It just takes a click of a button for someone to forward an email to a friend. Your best advertising comes from your existing customers making recommendations to their friends, and you absolutely know those emails that come from friends are being opened. I open emails from my friends first, don’t you? And when my friend deems something worthwhile, I definitely give it another look and often buy-in.
Cost Effective
Emails are very affordable. You can sign up right now with MailChimp for free and until your list exceeds 2,000 you can continue to use it for free. With email there is no postage and if you are offering a gift certificate or some sort of coupon, your customers are printing it or bringing it in on their smartphone, so you are also not paying for printing. Best of all, according to Direct Marketing Associate, for every $1 spent on email marketing, $40 comes back. I will take those odds any day!
So those are the four reasons email marketing should be a key element in your marketing plan, but how do you get started and what should you be putting in your emails?
When you consider what you are going to include for content, do some research. Sign up for some other newsletters, or just look through the ones you already subscribe to and consider what you like, what you respond to and what you think works. Also take a look at the information all the email services like MailChimp and Constant Contact provide. They offer lots of educational information about best practices and ideas for content and design that are most effective in your specific industry.
To start building your email list you can either buy a list or use Facebook ads to generate leads. In other words, run a Facebook contest and capture emails from those who enter. Facebook also has a feature on business pages that you can activate that will collect email addresses through your Facebook page. But the best place to start is with the people in front of you, your existing customers and the new ones that walk through your door. All you have to do is ask them to join. Tell them the benefits and they will be happy to sign up. One final tip, be sure to look at the emails as they sign up to make sure it is legible and you can add it to your list correctly.