Sophie Comas is the founder of Rimu Marketing, a team of marketing experts who help businesses to flourish by providing successful marketing solutions. Sophie believes that the secret to truly successful marketing is discovered when business owners are committed, engaged and part of the journey – an ethos that rings very true here at Blake Consultants too.

Read on for Sophie’s thoughts on whether email marketing, one of the earliest digital developments and an integral part of our CapsuleCRM offering, has got what it takes to stay the distance in our ever-advancing online world.

Email marketing is dead! Or is it?

Thank you to Julia for inviting me to write a guest blog about email marketing.  It is one of my favourite areas of marketing and a gift for any small business owner. 

I recently had a conversation with a small business owner, who was not a fan of email marketing, when I enquired why? they answered because I get too many emails!  It was an interesting view and one that confused me slightly.

Despite the increasing popularity of other digital communications such as social media, email marketing has managed to continue to be a key player.  With an estimated 306.4 billion emails sent and received each day in 2020 and the total number of global email users expected to reach a total of 4.6 billion in 2025, there is a strong argument to say that it is still a very valid way for us to connect with our current and potential customers.  (Source: Statistica)

What is email marketing?

It is hard these days to look around the internet without brands asking us to sign up to their newsletter, in exchange for a freebie or special offer.  The use of email marketing has become one of the core foundations of any marketing campaign, regardless of business size. It is an essential way for businesses to share their stories and information about how they can help their customers. 

Email marketing can be defined as: “A digital form of marketing communication, which can be used to inform those on your email list of your products, services, news and discounts.”  It can not only drive return on investment (ROI), but also help a business to share more about the “why” behind what they do, building an emotional connection and the know, like trust model we very often talk about. 

Why should I do email marketing?

Email marketing is a great way of building trust with your audience.  Through regular communication, you can take them on a carefully crafted tour of your world – introducing them to your business, your team and most importantly how you can help them.  Done well it is cited to achieve a 40:1 ROI, not a bad result.

Why should I not do email marketing?

Many however, are put off email marketing.  Influenced sometimes by big brands that get it wrong and send to many emails – bothering and overwhelming their audiences.  They then vote with their keyboard and unsubscribe, which I can completely understand.  It is important to take the time to plan your content, frequency and timing very carefully, ensuring you are always adding value to your current and potential customers.

Top Tips for good email marketing

 So what kind of things do we need to think about to ensure we get email marketing right?  Below we share five thoughts to get you started:

1. What are you trying to achieve? Be clear on what you are trying to achieve with your email marketing activity before you start. Just sending an email for the sake of it does not work, what do you want the end result to be?  Do you want your audience to read  your blog, join your workshop or buy a product or service from you?   
2. Get personal. Make the content relevant. Use my name in the subject line “Sophie, we have a special offer for you” or in the intro to the email “Dear Sophie”. You can also tailor the content, accordingly, based on their search history which will also encourage your audience to purchase something else from you
3. Share the right content at the right time. This is the foundation of good email marketing.  Moving forward, though sophisticated segmentation and automations, this tool will help to create a personalised VIP experience for a brand’s customers.  Of course, if this is all underpinned by a CRM system, it will make it work even more efficiently.   For example, there is no point sending an email to introduce your business to a contact that has been on your list for two-years and made multiple purchases.  They will become confused and start to disengage.
4. Depending upon your business think about your audience, what are their challenges and how can you help them?  Yes you wish to keep forefront of their minds, how often do you need to connect with them to achieve this?  Too often and they will leave, not enough and you are not maximising on the tool’s capability.  Think about what is realistic when you are at your busiest, a monthly newsletter is often a good place to start, then build from there.
5. Assess results. As with all marketing, it is key to continue to plan, implement and review your activity, ongoing. Email marketing is brilliant because it is so quick to assess success, you can generally tell within about 4hrs of deployment the results.  By checking out the open and click through rates, you can quickly see what works and what does not.  If your tools are more sophisticated you can also start to track revenue generated.

In conclusion, email marketing feels like it is here to stay, at least for now.  Done well it can be a powerful part of your marketing toolkit.  For sure it may resonate more with some audience vs others but there is always a way to tailor the media to work for your small business.

 

Thank you to Julia for inviting me to be a guest blog and of course if you have any email marketing questions I can help you with please get in touch and visit www.rimumarketing.co.uk.