Email Marketing for your Startup / SME — Part 2

In our ongoing series of Marketing blogs for the SME / Startup / Small Business community, this week we’re revisiting Email Marketing as a channel and stepping things up.

In the last blog Email Marketing for your Startup / SME — Part 1 we said you should take the steps to understand what you want Email Marketing to do for your business. This level of clarity is always good to refer back to in a pinch. Think ‘Is this why we started this channel in the first place?’ when in doubt about sending a mail to your customers with a picture of a fluffy cat on a Friday saying ‘hang in there‘.

We promised in that last blog that we would help you on the next stage — deciding what email provider would be a good choice.

There’s all manner of different platforms out there that can deliver a big range of compatibility from linking to social and websites to collecting emails though integrations. There’s so much that you can do with emails now that you’d be surprised how far the providers have come for their first stages years ago.

Some of the biggest platforms — MailChimp, Campaign Commander, Gmail for Business all have great functions and can be very cost effective. MailChimp is perhaps one of the best known, for good reason, as they have a vast raft of add-ons available, and a free version for those just starting out.

We’re about to make an assumption here — if you’re an SME/Small Business/Startup then pennies are being pinched and you’re certainly not flush. So we’re providing scaling options for Email Marketing from zero to hero. We’re talking from a database of nil all the way to, say about 5–8K signups. Why? Well, as we have already said, email is IMPORTANT to your business — increasingly so, and as with anything relating to your business, best is best. Free programs are fine to begin with but as with everything, you’ll grow up and out of the fit of a free service.

There’s pros and cons to every provider, but starting with one and taking time to learn the platform properly will pay dividends as you’ll get a much better understanding of how the channel works and can help to deliver your business goal. Our recommendation would be to head to MailChimp. It’s not perfect but it has so many things that you can do with it that there’s enough to keep you busy for a while.

Pros:

• Free up to 2,000 emails — cheap(ish) after
• It easily integrates to Twitter and Facebook to collect emails
• You can get free, professional looking templates
• Great functionality inside the platform for all your sending needs
• Easy to use from the start, powerful enough to grow with you to the stage when you’re better at Email marketing
• Lots of info about the platform to be found online so you can learn quickly
• Good reporting
• Live customer service

Cons:

• Overly picky about list imports and info@email handles
• Free version has limitations that are opened with even a little spend
• Niggling feeling that emails from their servers are quick to be tagged as spam
• Free version has to be tagged with their branding
• You can only send to one database list at a time

If you start with MailChimp, you’re not going to lose anything, your lists will be intact, you can start understanding what’s on offer and even if you learn with this platform, all the other platforms are similar so you’re not losing any time by becoming au fait with with everything — even if you decide to change later on.

Now that you’re signed up, let’s decide about your email scheduling.

Regularity. How often do you want your customers to hear from you? Every day, you’re brave! Not only is that a lot of work to set up, but that’s a lot of content to write and you’d have to be pretty special to hold people’s attention every day without them hitting the SPAM button with gusto.

Once every now and again — as and when? Might be a problem with not just the customer remembering they signed up with you, but also you’re not going to be bringing in anything regularly to the business.

Regularity of mails in Email Marketing is an art form for SME’s — talk too much and the customers will get bored, talk too little and it’s not a valid platform for R.O.I. (return on investment) or giving the customers what they want. Each SME has different customers so it stands to reason each SME will have a different content calendar. Though as a guide most start with a weekly mail, and they trial it on different days of the week for the first month or two to get a bit of data to see what times/ days offer the best open and click rates.

Open rate — a rate of which the email is opened — I.E send out 100 emails, 10 are opened = 10% open rate.

Click rate — the rate of clicks for the mails that are opened. I.E. 10 emails opened one clicked = 10% click rate.

Helpful hints:

• Customers like regular time slots — if they know they get a new book recommendation every Wednesday, they rely on it being delivered. Keep a calendar.
• Open rates over 10% are very good.
• Click rates over 10% are also very good.
• Email marketing starts with every element of the process from email Subject Lines through to invitations to click and images used in the email. Think about it all.
• High pressure tactics are likely to get that new email address you just spent time collecting to hit spam and get rid of you — you’re always one click away from the spam bin.
• You’re a person, so are your customers.
• Avoid doing things just because others do it, even if Amazon sends you a mail a day, it doesn’t mean you should do so to your customers.
• Every single person on your list is a potential customer — keep high standards of customer service and respond to them quickly and you’ll get rewarded with their custom.
• If someone his the spam button, don’t take it personally and whatever you do, don’t break the law and try to get around their preference and send them mails again.

Armed with an email provider, an idea of what you want email to deliver and content schedule, you’re now into some of the details of the emails. What does it look like, what does it link through to, how can I get better open and click rates, how should I manage the lists.

We’ll keep you up to date right here — ask us questions, comment and please feel free to get in contact as we’re here to help with our no obligation consultation.