You’d be missing a trick if you don’t look into selling your product or service via the medium through which most people can be reached.

Email success

Email marketing is the most effective way to use the internet to increase sales. It’s simpler than pay-per-click marketing to set up and run, and it’s more profitable, for mist businesses, than social media marketing through Facebook or Twitter.

Understand your audience

All Marketing begins with knowing who you’re communicating with. If you have existing customers, think about what they’re like: for example, whether they fit within a specific age range; tend to be of one gender or the other; and what their interests are. If you’re a hairdresser, it’s reasonable to assume that people signing up to your mailing list will be expecting you to write about hairdressing as well as sending through promotional offers and news. A driving instructor could provide theory-test tips as well as pointers on how to get cheaper insurance (the instructor could even profit from this by taking an agency fee for referring new customers to the insurers).

Firm up your offer

Think about what your customers, or potential customers, would like to receive in return for their email address; if in doubt, ask them! The offer must be easy for you to explain and administer. It must also be of real value to your customers and easy to redeem. If you have an online shop based on a ecommerce platform such as Woocommerce, you can easily create voucher codes for discount or free products. Just make sure you generate separate codes for your different marketing campaigns, so you can deduce which are working. If you run a “real world” business such as a hairdresser or driving instructors, you can invent your own codes. Again, it’s important to be organised and to give all codes and offers a limited life so that potential customers are encouraged to act sooner rather than later.

Sign people up

Here, we’re using MailChimp to build our email marketing list. Mailchimp offers a generous free membership that has all you need to get up and running quickly. Once you’ve signed up, you need to create a list for customers to sign up to. You can also integrate Mailchimp with Facebook, which adds the ability to have new emails automatically posted to your Facebook page, as well as allowing customers to sign up for your mailing list directly through Facebook. The key thing to remember is that the simpler and shorter the process for completing the sign-up, the more subscribers you’ll get.

Stand and Deliver

Make sure you thoroughly test the sign-up process, since this is the first impression potential customers will get of you. Publicise the list through an existing marketing and direct to customers, but remember that your message should be concentrate on what the subscriber gets out of joining rather than the list itself.