As I was getting my haircut a couple of weeks ago, my fabulous stylist was telling me about the exciting things going on with his business. First, he’s going to an amazing conference where he and a select few stylists will be setting the trends for fall (so cool!). And, he’s relocating to a new salon.
In listening to him talk, I couldn’t help but put my marketing hat on to ask how he’s letting his clients know about these things — especially the relocation.
His plan was to tell clients as they called or came in for appointments. Although that would certainly work, it became clear that he would benefit from email marketing.
I advised him to begin collecting emails from clients as they came in for appointments over the next couple of months, so he could communicate with them about these changes. That way, no one will fall through the cracks when he relocates.
This experience made me realize that there are likely plenty of businesses that are totally missing the boat on email marketing. After all, email marketing is not nearly as sexy as social media, but it can be far more effective.
Not only is email more intimate than other channels, but studies show that conversion rates are higher too.
Email Marketing Ideas for Your Business
Ready to get started? Let’s look at some ways you can put email marketing to work for your business:
- Share important announcements. Whether you’re moving locations like my stylist or adding new products or services, email is a terrific way to let your customers know what’s going on with your business. However, the important thing to remember is to make sure to relay how the announcement will impact or benefit your customers.
- Promote sales offers. Email is the perfect way to let your clients know about sales and special offers. For instance, when I visited my hair stylist, he told me that he was giving $10 off to all clients that week. Imagine how much more business he would have gotten if he had sent an email to his clients to let them know!
- Share tips and ideas. Keeping with the hairstylist example, imagine getting an email with tips with new ideas on how to style your hair each week or must-have products to help your hair combat the summer humidity or trends to look for in the fall. Wouldn’t you want to read that? I know I would. Think about valuable content your can share with your clients. Giving customers regular, useful information is a great way to stay top-of-mind with them.
- Send blog posts. If you’re already blogging, you can share your articles via email. There are multiple ways you can do this — mention them in a regular e-letter, write a custom email to correspond with each post or even set it up so each new blog post is automatically emailed to your audience. Whichever way you choose, blog content can definitely be re-purposed and shared with your email subscribers.
- Get feedback. When is the last time you got feedback from your customers? If you haven’t done that in awhile, email is a great way to capture that information. You can ask questions as part of your regular emails and encourage people to reply back to your messages. Or, you can send out online surveys to get feedback on specific aspects of your business. Either way, email is terrific for getting better insight into how your customers think about you and your business.
- Engage with leads. Email is a fantastic way to engage with and nurture leads. For instance, if you’re creating free premium content for your website such as eBooks, webinars, etc., you can capture emails to before giving access to that information. Then, you can set up email autoresponders (i.e. an email drip campaign) to continue to deliver messages at pre-determined intervals. This is a great way to stay in touch with people who are just learning about your business and might want to buy from you down the road.
- Invite people to events. Hosting a grand opening for your new office? Or, do you invite customers over for a regular mixer? Email is a great tool for that. Not only does it save you the cost of printing, but it can also make it easy for people to RSVP.
- Humanize your business. Want customers to get to know your business better? Email can do that. You can profile employees, give behind-the-scenes access to what you do, share compelling stories about your clients’ successes and so much more.
- Give access to special information. Because email subscribers are letting you into their inbox on a regular basis, treat them like VIPs. Give them access to extra information and tips that you don’t offer on your blog or anywhere else. Not only does this give people an incentive to subscribe, but it also makes people eager to open your messages.
How do you use email marketing?
There are dozens of other ways you can use email marketing for your business, but this should give you a good list of ideas to get started.
How do you use email marketing? What other ideas would you add to the list? If you don’t use email just yet, what questions do you have about getting started?
Talk to me in the comment section and let me know!
Image credit: Nicolas Oisel
2 replies on “9 Effective Ways to use Email Marketing for Your Business”
Email marketing sounds ESPECIALLY effective for a business like hair styling/salon owner because it’s so intimate. It’s not a business where you go in and out – you stay there, chat, get to know the hair stylist/owner and develop a relationship. It becomes much easier to collect emails that way + when they see an email from you, your customer will know its not spam and pay attention to it.
That’s an excellent point. Because the relationship already exists, there’s a level of trust there would make someone more likely to sign up for the emails and open them when they arrive.