Building your list of potential customers is important when interested in marketing your products or services, because it enables you to reach out to those you know are interested as opposed to indifferent. By sending promotional materials to those you know are interested, you’re able to focus your marketing efforts in a way aligned to be more effective … not to mention you avoid being labeled a spammer.
Once you’ve successfully enabled your visitors to hop on a newsletter list or subscribe to your updates and you’ve started building your list, you need to consider what you’re going to send those people.
There’s the obvious promotional content, such as announcements, seasonal promotions, and miscellaneous sales, but what else do you plan on sending people. The landscape of business is shifting dramatically, but consumers still prefer to purchase from larger companies due to the trust larger brands often provide, so you’ll need to think about how you’re going to set yourself aside from the larger companies and surpass what they can offer. One way to achieve both of these tasks is to offer some sort of loyalty program or discounts for your regular customers.
Email marketing tends to generate a great reaction, which in turn leads to increased conversions, so you have to decide how often you want to reach out to your subscribers.
Here are a few ideas to consider sending your subscriber list:
Helpful or Informational Content … All Free
One of the best ways to build your reputation as a go-to resource on a level the larger brands can’t really compete with is to provide a ton of helpful or informational content to your potential customer for free. This is called content marketing, and it works on a much longer scale than traditional ads, because it’s not merely going for the sale, it’s also building your brand and reputation.
This is usually where a blog come in hand, so if you haven’t already started one, this might be the best time to do so.
Promotional Announcements
If the best email marketing is all about providing your potential customer with something of value, then offering either promotional announcements, such as discounts, special deals for subscribers, and other product or service related announcements is the best way to connect with your customer and bring them in for sale.
Weekly Wraps
A great way to stay in touch with your subscribers, promote the latest content you’ve published to your website or blog, and even promote a few products along the way is to create a weekly overview or weekly wrap. These types of emails will review the content published throughout the week, thereby giving your subscribers an easy way to check out everything in once place.
Check out the past Home Base Learning Weeklys for an idea of what this type of content looks like — we publish it every Saturday.
Company Announcements
It’s best to lean toward sending only content of immediate value to your customers, but company announcements also fall into the type of content you could send to your leads. Again, it’s best if the content provides immediate benefit to your customer, otherwise, it’s too self-promotional and people will unsubscribe from you. The occasional company announcement shouldn’t pose much of a problem though.
Those were just a few ideas regarding what you could send those interested in what you have to offer, but before you can send anything you need to focus on building your list, so be sure to include a sign up form in either the header or sidebar of your website (the more prominent the better), and get building.
Check back tomorrow or subscribe to the blog via email as we’ll be continuing this series on email marketing with coverage of how to implement your email schedules.
cc image credit: M Hillier