Email marketing. More social than media.
The dark horse of online marketing, other wise known as mail outs. Often over looked this method of online marketing is fundamental to building personal relationships with your audience. Email marketing is making a sharp come back, due to the development of the smart phone. Emails are easily accessed by everyone, everywhere. People check emails more often than they check Facebook. Emails have a longer life span in comparison to social media (SM) posts. These SM posts are easily lost via filtering and sheer volume.
Email marketing is the most effective and personal method of communicating with your audience. People appreciate personal communication. They appreciate short emails, that address them by their name, and tell them exactly the information they are after. Email marketing tends to be over looked because of the hype surrounded by the recent social media boom. Sending emails in relation to SM tends to seen as calling a home phone number over a mobile number. It’s old school. BUT it’s not going anywhere. Especially in regards to business communication. So don’t you forget it. Email marketing combined with social media efforts will drive conversions, increase ROI and communication between you and your audience. So get to in-boxing!
How you should approach e-mail marketing?
Bulk emails. The last thing you want to do is send a whole lot of emails individually, or via gmail. This kind of behaviour will see you flagged as a spam monster. Theres no need to waste all that time either. Bluethumb likes ‘Sendicate’. Sendicate is an email app/site that brings together simplicity and design to send emails to people who matter. They make it super easy. It’s quick to set up, quick to compose, and the formatting is really nice too. Check it out for sure!
Who’s inbox?
Now..once you are set up, you need to start thinking about who you are going to inbox. You need to organise, segment, and define your subscribers. Ask yourself questions like: Who are my subscribers? Are they customers? Repeat buyers? Galleries? General Audience?. Also think about how you will find them, and what they will want to read. Divide them into separate lists. You are doing this because down the track you may want to approach only one certain segment.
Whatcha gonna say?
Next you must determine the content of your emails. Your audience will want to know about your new works, works in progress and works for sale to start with. You should also write about upcoming events, exhibitions, share photos of past events, articles written about you and anything you feel they should know/ may be interested in. Keep the emails short, useful and make sure it benefits the reader in someway. I say this because really…people are bombarded with e-mails everyday. If you’d like to write a longer email, for example sharing a blog, you should link away to it in a short initial email. Don’t be shy either. Add your personality. write to your audience in the same manner as if you were speaking to them face to face. This will help you form personal bonds.
When are ya gonna send it?
Next you want to determine your sending frequency, and goals. Will you send everyday? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly? I recommend weekly. Daily might be annoying and monthly- not quite enough to keep your work in mind. Think about your goals. Do you want to drive regular traffic to your site? Do you want to inform your subscribers of an upcoming exhibition? Are you trying to promote sales? These goals should help you determine when, and how often, to send which emails.
Finally I recommend that within your emails- link to your social media accounts. As discussed previously, you want all your marketing efforts to be as seamless as possible. Happy inboxing guys! 🙂
