by Brittany McSorley
There are many ways to approach social media marketing on Cape Cod. Depending on the specifics of your brand and audience, you may focus on creating engaging content on Facebook, showcasing your business visually with Instagram, or establishing yourself as an industry expert on LinkedIn. But you’d be remiss not to dedicate some serious time and effort to the marketing channel with the highest ROI: email.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is all about contacting and building relationships with both existing and potential customers. Because sending an email creates a direct communication line between business and audience, its reach consistently outperforms that of social media marketing, where engagement is less of a sure thing. Even if you’ve completely perfected your SEO strategies, your customers are still more likely to open an email from you than to see and engage with one of your social media posts. According to Bigfish Creative Group, the click-through rate of most email campaigns is 50-100 times greater than that of Facebook and Twitter content.
Email marketing covers a broad range of content: you can use email campaigns to introduce yourself to potential customers, thank new customers, announce promotions and discounts, and establish brand trustworthiness, to name just a few.
How do I start?
The best email marketing campaigns have a clear objective. Whether you’re looking to boost sales, establish a strong brand reputation, or simply introduce yourself to prospective clients, your email content should reflect that goal.
Building your email list is crucial. If your customers purchase from your business online, you can ask for their emails at checkout. On social media, you can use sign-up links to encourage your customers to subscribe to email communications. This way, they can stay up to date with your business and its offerings. In general, give your customers as many opportunities as possible to sign up for communications from you.
Once you have an audience, what should you tell them? Your emails should be polite and offer something useful, such as information about a promotion, announcement of a new product, or a newsletter with valuable content about your community and industry. Once you’ve developed a relationship your audience, you can make stronger sales pitches in your emails (but not so often that your communications seem spammy!).
What should I keep in mind?
The most successful email marketers are good at putting themselves in their customers’ shoes. Think about what makes you open and engage with email content, and what kind of emails you’re more likely to just delete. If you have a favorite email newsletter that you devour on a daily or weekly basis, study it and decipher what exactly you love about it.
When you compose your emails, be honest and available, but don’t push too hard. Since email marketing has a strong click-through rate, your content doesn’t need to be quite as brief or persuasive as it would on a social media post. Take the time to really talk to the people on the other end of the digital line.
Finally, use a service like Mailchimp or Constant Contact to measure your metrics; keep an eye on your open and click-through rates, and adjust your campaigns accordingly. Don’t be scared to have some fun—at the end of the day, it’s only an email.
Using this guidance, you should be able to make an impact in many an inbox.
