Blue Larch LLC
Email Newsletters / Email Marketing
A powerful way to communicate with your customers and generate repeat business is email marketing. This can be done in the form of email newsletters or promotional emails.
How to get started?
We recommend choosing a service and not trying to handle everything yourself. There are a number of companies who have built the intrastructure and technology to handle email mailing lists (and provide security on them) plus offer numerous tools to create attractive and effective HTML based emails and analyse their performance (how many are opened, how many result in clicks through to your site.....).
We currently recommend MailChimp™ as an easy to use solution with a rich toolset for analyzing performance, all at a reasonable price point.
Constant Contact™ is another service provider we have experience with as a reputable and solid provider of email marketing services.
The first thing to do is to understand what you will be do with email addresses when you get them, then integrate a sign-up form on your site clearly stating what you will and will not do with their information. Then start collecting registrants to communicate with later.
Once you start sending out communications this way you need to commit to a schedule of doing so. Its too easy to slip so if you can't commit to a monthly schedule then make it quarterly. Email newsletters can take time to assemble so build that time into a plan so you set time aside for writing.
WIFM?
What's In It For Me? You need to consider this when asking for email addresses. Why should they give you their information? What's in it for them? You need to give value in your communications: useful information, money saving coupons..... something to justify opening your emails or its all for nought and you'll be unsubscribed, or your messages will be just deleted.
Privacy
Your customers or potential customers are entrusting you with their private information. Respect their privacy, use their email address and other information ONLY for the purpose you told them they were providing it to you, don't share them with 3rd parties unless you have their permission. These are the types of codes of conduct that you need to live up to when using email marketing techniques. Never send unsolicited emails and always respect their wishes if they opt to unsubscribe.
Reach out to us today and we will help you determine the best approach and integrate a sign up form on your site. We can also build the HTML email templates to match your site's branding to ensure a quality experience.