Most businesses have a website presence but only a minority are maximising their website to take advantage of visitors. We’re living in an age where data mining is critical to ensuring we understand customer behaviour and maximise ROI. Therefore, when investing in marketing and digital media in general, we need to look at all forms of customer interaction and find innovative ways to retain them. This is where email marketing is useful but as always, there are important things to bear in mind before embarking on this.
How to Get Sign Ups
The first step to trying to use email marketing is to generate a database of leads. You need to collate and collect interested parties who may be interested in your products in the future. Doing this is not an easy task. Most websites that invest in SEO recognise there is always a goal to a page or blog post. The goal may be to get a sale or have them subscribe to your mailing list.
We recommend you analyse blog posts with loads of traffic and set calls to action that invite visitors to sign up to your mailing list. This can be as easy as a contact form or a pop-up which asks them to put their email in. This is not unique to just b2b companies, even something as niche as an online poker coach UK is taking advantage of email marketing in this way.
Stay GDPR Compliant
Data protection is a massive deal at the moment and will continue to in the future. Therefore, always ensure your ways of gaining subscribers are compliant with the relevant laws. GDPR is the authority on data protection in the UK. Since it’s inception a few years ago, websites have had to radically change how they operate to ensure they are behaving in the right manner.
We highly recommend you to use contact forms that are compliant with GDPR and have a suitable privacy policy in place. By having these things in order and collecting visitors details correctly, you will build a trusted brand and also be safe from any parties that claim you are spam emailing them.
Monthly Newsletter
Now we’ve discussed how to get signups and compliance, we arrive at the end point – newsletters. A monthly newsletter is a brilliant way to engage with your marketing list. In addition to using it as a medium to tell them about news, promotions and giveaways, it can also be a way of keeping your website in their mind.
The trick with newsletters is to issue them regularly but not too much. People don’t want to be bombarded with emails so keeping it routine but not overloading it is the best way. We recommend issuing a newsletter once a month, generally around the same date. Choosing how often to publish a newsletter is different from one business to another so it’s to you to find the sweet spot.
The great thing about a monthly email newsletter is that you can track and analyse key interactions like open rate, clicks and bad things like unsubscribes. Email marketing like this can be incredibly powerful and cost-effective if you use the right software. We recommend using a platform like Mailchimp. They offer very reasonably priced deals and free plans too. The biggest companies in the world use them so they must be doing something right!
