Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective tools for marketing to existing customers and prospects. It is an excellent way to re-solicit business or donations from prior customers or donors. Even if someone doesn’t open and read your email, it’s a very affordable way to maintain top-of-mind awareness.
A strong email marketing program requires having a robust database of email addresses, including current and potential customers (prospects). While you may think the easiest way to build a list of prospects is to purchase lists of email addresses, it is NOT advised. It is important to remember that email is permission-based. If you send unsolicited emails to prospects, it is considered spam. And spamming is illegal based on the Can Spam Act approved by Congress in 2003.
Instead, try these five tactics to build your prospect list to take your email marketing campaigns to the next level.
- Include a widget or graphic on your website or blog: One of the simplest ways to capture email addresses is to have a graphic or widget on the sidebar of every page of your website or blog. Most of the major email service providers have widgets that allow you to simply copy and past the necessary code directly onto your website or blog. You’ll see an example of one of these in the sidebar at NaplesPrintSource.com.
- Set up a link in your blog: If you have a blog, include a link in the text of the blog post. At the conclusion of each of my blog posts, I include the following text: “Like what you’re reading? Have you signed up for our enews yet?” You may be surprised by the number of captures from this simple tactic.
- Keep your sign up form simple: To minimize roadblocks and encourage subscriptions, keep the sign up form as simple as possible. The simplest forms required only an email address. At most, you should ask for first name, last name and email address.
- Offer an incentive: An incentive does not need to be elaborate. For example, by signing up, you can give those who respond access to some premium content like a white paper or a recorded webinar. Or, if you have an e-commerce site, you can offer them a one-time 10% discount, or give them a coupon code for a free widget with their first purchase. Make sure that what you offer is related to the content in your email marketing so you don’t have people signing up for the worg reason and then quickly unsubscribing.
- Implement a direct mail campaign: Direct mail can be a powerful tool for motivating customers and prospects to sign up for your email marketing. A simple postcard direct mail campaign developed for one of our clients, with the specific goal of driving cutomers to sign up for their enews, resulted in an incredible 18 percent response rate.
As you continue to build your email database, also take time to evaluate the effectiveness of your current email marketing campaigns. Is there room for improvement? Are you achieving industry standards? One of the cornerstones of successful email marketing is consistency. This is also one of the most common areas where organizations seem to fail. Whether it’s the result of poor planning, not understanding how email marketing platforms work, or staff turnover, campaigns are often stalled inconsistent or abandoned. The good new is the team at Naples Print Source is here to help your organization execute a professionally designed email marketing campaign.
Our platform of choice is MailChimp and our team is MailChimp-certified. Your email marketing campaign can be approached in one of two ways.
1. We can take your raw content and format on your behalf directly into MailChimp.
2. If you have an existing MailChimp account, you can grant us access to set up campaigns for you. If you’ve lost a team member who has been doing your email marketing or you plan to hire a future team member to handle email marketing, we are available to assist you during the transition.
If you are ready to see how you can improve your email marketing effectiveness, contact us today to schedule a consultation and a quote.
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