The Easy Email Marketing Guide For Busy SME's

Why email marketing?

It’s incredibly rare these days to meet someone who doesn’t have an email account. Given that just about everyone uses email, it’s a really easy way to stay in contact with your existing customers, prospects and new leads. We’re also living in this amazing point in history where we can reach out to people in real time via their mobile device.

Not only does a great email marketing strategy allow you to connect in a personalised way with each individual in your target audience, but it’s also a very affordable way to boost your brand awareness, build trust and increase sales.

As long as you’re equipped with your detailed User Personas, email marketing allows for highly targeted messaging. Tools such as MailChimp make it super easy to measure and analyse the success of your campaigns, by tracking delivery rates, bounce rates, new subscribers and unsubscribes, click through rates, and open rates. All this information enables us to continually tweak, improve and master our marketing strategies.

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How to capture leads

1. Know your audience!

It’s so important to create User Personas (aka Avatars) for your products or services! Many businesses don’t spend as much time on this task as they should, and end up attracting less-than-ideal customers as a result. In fact, some people will skip this altogether, rely only on a few statistics and jump in without really understanding who their target market is. Without this first step, the following steps are uninformed and bound to be ineffective.

2. Define your campaign goal

Who specifically do you want to market to? And why? Is your campaign directed at your existing customers? Are they active or inactive? It’s important to keep your active customers happy with useful content that makes their life easier, while re-engaging your inactive customers with special offers and exciting new updates. Newsletters and eCourses are ideal for your existing customers.

Or is your campaign goal aimed at your leads? Your leads are the people who are already consuming some of your content and are on your email list, but are yet to become customers. Free consultations, free templates and checklists are great magnets for your leads.

Perhaps the goal of your campaign is to capture totally new emails to add to your list. Your prospects are new to your business and they don’t know your story yet. They’ve landed on your website for one of two reasons - either you’ve done a great job with SEO and they’ve found you through a Google search, or you’ve nailed your social media strategy and they want to read more about what you’ve got to say on your blog. Use softer-sell, education-focused magnets (such as eBooks) to share your story and expertise with your prospects.

3. Brainstorm lead magnet ideas

What’s something you can offer in exchange for an email address? What’s something your ideal customer would find really useful and happily share their email address for? What little solution can you provide to a problem they’re facing? Using your User Persona profile to guide you, brainstorm all the offers, competitions, templates, checklists, case studies, or anything else that comes to mind. Remember - it should be something relatively quick and easy for you to fulfil. Lead capture shouldn’t put any stress (financial or otherwise) on you, or your business. Here are 69 lead magnet ideas for some inspiration!

‍#Tip: Make your lead magnet really specific, rather than general. The more specific you are about the benefits of what you’re offering, the more likely it is to turn your leads into prospective customers.

4. Create downloadable content

Whether it’s a PDF, an eBook, a report or even an online course - it’s critical that this content is super ‘on-brand.’ So make sure you use your logos, fonts, colours and imagery. This will increase brand awareness and make it difficult for other businesses to claim it as their own.

#Tip: Make your free download fairly quick and easy to digest, but create something with very high perceived value (and of course, high actual value). Do you need help with creating quality content? We can help!

5. Create a lead capture landing page and use social media

As you can see now, there’s a lot more to lead capture than putting a sign up form on your website!We highly recommend creating a landing page specifically designed for capturing emails, and using your social media platforms to drive prospects, leads or existing customers to this landing page.

Do you need help with your social media strategy? We can help!

6. Set up your email funnel

An email funnel is an automated chain of email marketing messages which guide a lead towards a desired action in a non-invasive way, and a well-designed funnel should form part of your email marketing strategy. They start with a warm welcome and introduction, before moving on to engaging content and offers. The goals of each stage of the funnel are as follows:

‍Awareness --> Consideration --> Conversion --> Loyalty --> Advocacy

An email funnel automatically generates new ‘cold’ prospects and leads, and delivers a series of curated messages to their inbox. A great funnel will nurture cold leads with targeted content, getting them to trust your brand and eventually convincing them to purchase from you. The best email funnels will take your first-time buyers on a content journey that will turn them into loyal customers and your biggest fans who will advocate your brand for free! This instructional video will show you how to set one up in MailChimp.

‍We understand how difficult it can be to find the time and reliable resources to make your marketing journey a success, so we hope this email marketing guide makes things easier! Like what we say and think someone else needs to hear it? Feel free to share our training blogs on social media, or email the link below!

‍https://mailchi.mp/blueclay/the-easy-email-marketing-guide-for-busy-smes

‍Next month we'll continue on this topic with a step-by-step guide to creating your first email marketing campaign in our favourite email distribution platform, MailChimp!