email Marketing – an Introduction or Helpful Guide
Managing your email Newsletter communications is important nowadays, to stay in touch with Customers and Friends. If you do not have one now, consider starting one today.
It takes time, so we try to recommend some useful Apps – you may recognise some and others will be new. Lets look at Mailchimp, which is like Klaviyo, Hubspot, MailerLite or Constant Contact. Mailchimp is only FREE for up to 500 contacts or 2000 sends per month. Hubspot will offer a FREE tool, although once you get sucked in by this you find it hard to ecape their clutches and they will get your credit card for upgrades or add-ons eventually.
Create an email Marketing Plan
This useful FREE App MailChimp is a “Cloud” based FREE email marketing app that allows you create Newsletters and mail them FREE to up to 500 subscribers and even share the newsletter via Social Media avenues, Facebook and Twitter. This is a good tool to start with, initially at least. Learn to walk with this before you run with a more complex tool.
Try emailing once a month and then be consistent, same day or date and same time every month. You can move to weekly when you have the hang of it, if you have enough useful relevant valuable content to share with your audience.
Start by creating an account, then add your details. Now add your contact list by importing from say Excel to Mailchimp. Use first name, surname and email address, maybe phone number – keep it simple. Import existing customer lists from your system with the FREE import tool. Needless to say these contacts should have opted in and given you their permission for you to send them email newsletters. Keep adding new contacts and build up your list, as you go. A legitimate business interest can be added, but we recommend emailing them to tell them and give them the option to say no or Unsubscribe.
Get the message right in email Marketing !
E-mail marketing is all about delivering quality valuable content that people want to read, so personalise it, deliver it at the right time, measure the results, test options and get better as you go – listen to the feedback. If you are offering something, make it a Special Offer – do not Spam people or they will simply “Unsubscribe”. If you get any Unsubscribes, take that as a hint and guidance, so work out why people might unsubscribe. Fix the problem.
Tip: Do tweak the default Unsubscribe text to say something friendly such as ‘You can Unsubscribe at any time. However we promise we will never Spam you. And you may find some of our web design Newsletter items very useful from time to time.’ Something like that
Nurture your list by sharing useful Tips or articles. Always add value when you are asking someone to invest time to read your mail or newsletter etc.
There is the FREE version of Mailchimp and there is a paid version if you need more capacity, but most small companies can manage with a limit of 500 subscribers or 2000 monthly sends. The Standard option is $18 a month for 6000 names, but you can get the Essentials plan starting at $12.00 for 5000 subscribers – see their Pricing Page.
email is under your control with no middlemen like Google or Facebook, who can change their policies or algorithms at will and affect your Digital Marketing. Any questions about email marketing for your business – contact [email protected] or have a look at the video by Darrell Wilson here. Or why not take 15 minutes to read a more detailed article here about the best email marketing software options. Written by Gael Breton over at Authority Hacker this covers more detail, answers loads of questions and ranks the options available to you, to help you come to the right decision for your company.
What do we use ourselves at MEANit?
As of 2020 we stopped using Mailchimp and started using Active Campaign to send out our Mailshot every week. This is a paid app, so we pay for the ‘Lite’ version for 2500 names at $49 a month. The ‘normal’ rate is $99 a month, but we are happy with the $49 monthly deal. We feel we will use the integrations that are available with this plan. There is also an option for under 500 names for just €9 a month. Active Campaign will continually try to upsell you to their CRM Customer Relationship Managment tool for an additional fee. We all need one of these CRMs too, but currently we use Airtable for this at present.
The client onboarding at Active Campaign is excellent. And they offer loads of help, in the form of guides, videos and one to one personal support. They also help if you want to upload your list or import it from somewhere else. They will want you to show where you got the email addresses from, to ensure that your list is legit.
