4 types of emails you need to be sending
Want to learn more about our favorite email marketing platform? Check out this post.
Email marketing can help you engage new customers – in addition to helping you sell your products; email marketing will help you enhance your brand awareness and build trust with new prospects. Once you’ve engaged a customer, it can even help you build brand loyalty.
For businesses of any size, email marketing is a no brainer. If you have a small marketing budget, it’s an easy way to connect with a lot of customers at once. In addition to being low investment, it drives traffic to your website and it’s the channel most customer prefer.
As your company grows you can also scale your email marketing efforts – making it a useful tool no matter what stage of growth your business is at.
One study from Marketing Sherpa reports that 72% of consumers prefer to receive promotional messages through email (source).
You can send a wide variety of different emails to your marketing list, but if you’re just getting started with email marketing, there’s a few types of emails we suggest you start with. These four types are all great to engage both new customers and old leads.
1. Welcome email
This is your first chance to get your newfound relationship off on the right foot. Your welcome email should include key components like:
A thank you message for choosing your brand
Links to your social media channels to encourage additional engagement
A discount or deal that’s exclusive to new customers (this not only demonstrate a token of appreciation, but it will give them a nudge to browse your products or services again)
As with any type of email, your welcome email should be kept short and sweet to ensure the recipient isn’t overwhelmed with information. We suggest sending this initial email within 48 hours of signing up or making a purchase - the sooner the better though. Often, people will actively check for your name in their inbox after a sale’s been processed, so any later can look a little lazy!
2. Regular newsletters
Newsletters are an excellent way to naturally maintain contact with customers – it’s a great way to share useful information while also ensuring your brand remains at the forefront of their mind.
Your newsletter could include content like:
Blogs relevant to the product/service they took out
Company updates
Competitions/giveaways
Teasers: if you’ve got something new coming out
Testimonials: to reaffirm you’re a good brand to be with
Your newsletters should be consistent. Don’t send three in one month and then go silent for the next four. Decide how regular you want to start sending them - weekly, biweekly, monthly or quarterly. Try to stick to the same date and time too, that way people can start to expect (and hopefully look forward to) your updates.
3. Promote your products
Existing customers present a potential gold mine of up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. If they’ve already purchased from you there’s a good chance they already enjoy your brand, so it’s a waste not to play on that.
It’s really important you don’t go overboard with these kind of emails though. If you do, you run the risk of recipients unsubscribing and losing all chances of reaching out to them.
Your promotional emails should:
a) Be clearly targeted
b) Focus on quality, rather than quantity
c) Outline why this product is suited to them
d) If possible, offer an additional incentive - i.e. a discount
4. Ask for a review
If you never ask there’s no chance you’ll get what you want, right?
Reviews are key to your success. The majority of prospects will peruse your reviews before making their final decision, so the more high-quality testimonials you have to your name, the more chance you have of attaining new leads.
For existing customers, reviews provide an open platform to air opinions, and show that you a) care what they think, and b) are looking to continually improve and evolve your offering for them.
Don’t be too keen with your review request though. To make sure it’s meaningful, give the customer chance to actually use your product or service first. Equally though, make sure you don’t leave it too long, if you do, you might slip off their radar before you land in their inbox. We suggest waiting a minimum of about 2-3 weeks before prompting someone for a product review, but no more than 2 months.
Hue & Tone Creative: Email Marketing in Greensboro, NC
Whether you need help building your overarching email strategy, putting words together, or branding your template, we’re your go to experts. To start or improve your email strategy today, get in touch with our team at (336) 365-8550 or hannah@hueandtonecreative.com.