Stacey Sansom Designs - Trade Show Thursday

Improving Your Brand Online: Email Marketing

In order for your marketing efforts to be most effective, you will need to use multiple platforms and mediums. You cannot do all of your marketing through social media alone. There are still plenty of people who refuse to use social media, have used it and no longer use it, or are taking a break from social media. There are many people that only use one social media platform. If you limit all of your marketing efforts to social media, you stand to lose a lot of your potential customer base.

Marketing in focused groups is good, but you need to remember to diversify to spread your reach.  If you only use social media as your means to drive traffic to your blog and/or website, you are missing out on many other valuable opportunities.

Enter email marketing

I am not talking about the SPAM emails that we all love to hate, I am talking about legitimate email newsletters that many people frequently sign up for and serve a legitimate purpose. These are the newsletters that people want to receive. They are informative. They contain discount codes and coupons. They contain information about upcoming events, sales, etc. They are helpful and server some purpose for informing your potential customers.

When is an email newsletter too much?

Of course, there is always the point where usefulness exceeds expectations and it quickly moves into what your potential customers might consider SPAM. That being said, there is a happy medium in email marketing, you just have to find it.

I like to use the “measure” of “what do I like?” For me personally, it is as little as possible. My email accounts are overflowing with the plethora of newsletters from various websites and businesses. When you go away for 2-3 days and only check your email as infrequently as possible while you are gone, it almost becomes too much for many people to handle. The newsletters are trashed immediately as they just do not have time or energy to deal with them when they do get around to sitting down and sorting through the few days of emails they were unable to fully read. For me, that quickly goes from 100-500+ emails in a short amount of time.

As a result of this personal experience, the email newsletters that I send out tend to be a little longer. While they may be longer in length, they are fewer in number and have a longer amount of time in between them. I will jump right to rare as a time definition here. My goal is to send out at least 1 per month, but as of right now it is more like 1 per quarter.

You have to use are measure that is comfortable and works for your business.

Getting subscribers

It is important to get people to become subscribers to your blog or website. You especially want subscribers to your newsletters. Getting these subscribers, however, can be a challenge.

Whether or not you have an actual log-in website, you want repeat and constantly returning customers/visitors. By encouraging a sign-up on the website you are telling them that you have more content available than may be found on the website. Your subscriptions imply that there will be content that is special to those with memberships. Your subscribers to your newsletter are expecting alerts of the latest and greatest, new releases, etc.

If you do not disappoint your subscribers and you do not SPAM them, your email newsletter can be an essential key part of your marketing strategy. Do not forget your “call to action” points in both your emails and on your website/blog. Encourage readers to want to sign up and ultimately look for more.

Do not buy out or sell out your subscribers

Do not try to build your email marketing list with a list you bought off the internet (or anywhere else for that matter). This is not okay and usually yields mostly unproductive results.

On the other hand, please keep in mind that it is NOT OKAY to sell people’s information that you personally collect. That is bad! Please be respectful and kind.

Do not SPAM your customers

No one likes SPAM emails. Do not SPAM your customers. If you step into the area of sending too many emails, you can lose potential customers just as fast as you can build their trust. Do not be intrusive in people’s email inboxes. That is sure to get your flagged as SPAM and all your efforts will be for naught.

 

 

Go build a sign-up for your email marketing list.

What are some of the best ways that you have found to increase your list?

 

 

See also: Have a brand, Start your blog or website, Create your content, Making Social Media Work, Making social media efforts matter, Share!, Email marketing, More on content, Give something away, Online marketing is not a one time deal.

 

Improving Your Brand Online: Email marketing
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