Email Marketing

What is email marketing?

Email marketing or email direct marketing is using email to market your services directly to the people who have signed up to be part of your email database.

Why is email marketing important for your business?

One of the most important tenets of online marketing is to ‘build your business on your own land’. That’s why building an email list is something every business should start from Day 1.

Don’t build your business solely on rented land, where your business is subject to algorithms and strategies over which you have no control. What if Facebook or Instagram shut down your account tomorrow or your account got hacked? Would you lose 100% of your customers and your business?

Have an engaged email database is insurance against such an eventuality. The people on your database have given you permission to contact them directly, to let you in the door into their private inboxes.

My biggest business regret with my family travel blog www.tothotornot.com? Not starting an email database from the beginning. I only started 4 years ago and I have built a database of 15k subscribers. To think of all the opportunities that I missed for 5 years before that!

*Source: The Ultimate List of Email Marketing Stats, Hubspot 2020

Why most people don’t do email marketing well

Let’s be honest, email marketing is not as sexy as social media.

And it takes time and energy to build an email list – that means showing up consistently, providing useful information and entertaining content so that people will keep opening your messages and be ready to buy when you are in ‘selling’ mode.

The common reasons small business owners tell me they don’t have an email list, or don’t regularly send out emails include:

• ‘It just feels too hard and I don’t get an immediate reward in terms of likes, followers etc on social media’
• ‘I don’t know what to write.’
• ‘I don’t want to be pushy or be too salesy.’
• ‘I’m not sure how frequently to email people, I don’t want to annoy them!’
• ‘My email list is tiny and it doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort.’

Why you should care about email marketing

Let me get this straight. It doesn’t really matter how BIG your email list is. What’s most important is how engaged that list is.

The people who invite you to contact them and then open your emails are your true fans. They are likely to be the most interested, most engaged members of your audience. The people with whom you have the strongest relationship and who know, like and trust you – and who are most likely to buy from you.

Imagine talking to someone every week, every fortnight or every month. Over the years, think about the kind of relationship you can form with that person!

You can have a list of just 100 people. If even 20 of those people open your emails and 5 of those people engage with you in some way – that’s 5 potential customers.

If you’re a solopreneur in say a service-based industry eg a graphic designer, you can probably only service 5 clients at a time anyway.

If you have an e-commerce store, that’s 5 sales from your most engaged customers, who are most likely to buy from you time and time again.

How I can help you with email marketing

Setting up good email marketing practices takes time and effort at the start, but it can reap dividends for many months and years down the track.

I can help you to write content, design and publish eDMs and set up email automation series.

I am proof that doing email marketing well works. I send out an email every week (generally) and every time I send it out my website traffic spikes, I get an increase in advertising revenue and affiliate sales. Occasionally I receive sponsorship revenue from advertisers who wish to send out sponsored marketing emails to my database of primary Melbourne families/women aged 35-50 years.

I also receive personal responses from readers. People I’ve never met in real life telling me what they’re enjoying about my content, that they’ve been following me for years and never reached out before, that they are going through the same things I’m going through and giving me back tips, positive messages and feedback.

I can teach you how to do email marketing properly – or I can do it for you!

Still not sure if you need email marketing in your business?

Let’s have a chat! Just book a free 15-minute no-obligation call with me so that I can learn more about your business needs.