6 Steps to start Email Marketing for Startups

Couple of the issues any small company or startup face during early stages of putting a marketing strategy together is: “How do I create customer relationships?”, “How do I create brand loyalty and generate leads with minimal budget?”. The title of this post might be a give away, but the answer is email marketing.

I’m not saying forget about social or offline, however email marketing should come first. One good reason is because there are more active email addresses out there than Facebook and Twitter put together. Also, sending a targeted email, due to its low cost, can generate x1000 more ROI than social ads. I’m going to assume you’re convinced email marketing should come first and the rest should follow accordingly, so here I’ll go through 6 easy steps to get you up and running with your email marketing strategy.

1 ) Grow your contact list organically

From day one of founding your company, you should look into capturing the right email addresses so you can start creating rapport with your potential customers. The easiest way to do this is to sign up with an email service provider (ESP) who gives you access to a newsletter signup widget. Most ESPs have a freemium subscription and provide you this widget for free. Without any coding knowledge, you can then place the widget to capture email addresses from day one!

2 ) Automate your sales communication

Don’t underestimate the power of triggered emails. Once you have launched your product or service, even it’s only a minimal viable product, maintain communication with your customer through different stages of their journey with you. Using services like Intercom allows you to set email triggers for different stages of the customer experience, including a welcome series when they initially sign up, to re-engagement attempts when they haven’t used your product for 2 weeks — all automated.

3 ) Cross-pollinate Social and Email

Don’t run your email, social and offline as siloes. Merge your efforts together to yield better results. Do you have a good Twitter following? Why not turn them into your email subscribers? Using simple free tools such as Twitter Lead Gen Cards you can capture your followers’ email addresses just like a widget on your website.

4 ) Content is king

When you’re already busy putting out multiple fires, creating content for your blog or email campaign can be one of the most difficult things to find time or inspiration for. So work smarter, not harder (or in this case lazier).

To begin with, create a content calendar where you do round-robin between your co-founders and / or interns, where each of you will create a blog post per month. If there’s 4 of you in the team, then this will result in 1 piece a week and the beauty of it is that it will capture your company’s point of view from multiple angles. Now try and say you can’t dedicate 45 minutes a month to create a blog post.

If you’ve already created some pieces of content, then use these for inspiration and see if you can follow up on any of the previous issues you’ve tackled in your blog posts.

5 ) Replace interns with free tools

Is your design intern off on holiday right now or you don’t believe in taking on interns without paying them? Try using some simple and free tools to reuse graphics you already have. One of our favorites is Canva, you can create brand new email headers and banners as well as social media images in a couple of minutes. Or, manipulate old images to create something fresh.

So you’ve created your “lazy” content, what’s next? Well now we put the email together. No time to curate a newsletter? No fear, use Publicate. You can use Publicate to put together your newsletters through an easy-to-use dashboard by dragging and dropping different links to populate your new piece. Then, embed the HTML code into your email template and you’re good to go!

6 ) Test, test, test, test, test and test some more

When setting up your email marketing, you should make sure you choose the right ‘From Name’ so your customers or prospects can recognise you. You’ll also want to have the right ‘Subject Line’ so they open your emails, a clickable call-to-action button and a catchy design so they click on your links.

How do you decide what’s right for you? Test EVERYTHING! Through A/B testing you start to see a pattern of how your contact list interacts with your emails and what performs best.

Are you starting email marketing for the first time? Why not try the online Flight Academy course to get you started?