Welcome to another educational blog post from Christina Barker, Manager at Dolphin Outsourcing Ltd.
Today Christina will be talking about email marketing and how it can help you and your business grow with sales or new customers.
Watch the video or read the transcript below to find out more.
If you have any questions or are looking for some business support, please get in touch with us, and we will be happy to help - https://www.dolphin-outsourcing.co.uk/. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel!
Hi everyone, it's Christina Barker from Dolphin Outsourcing. Today, I'd like to talk to you about why you should use email marketing. So, deciding where to place your marketing efforts can sometimes be difficult for many small business owners. Usually, they have limited budgets, and you're looking for as much free marketing as possible. You also have limited time and resources to invest in marketing that isn't going to deliver results. So what you can do is use email marketing. The way you can do that is usually MailChimp. MailChimp, I find, is the best one. It's what we can teach some of our clients, or we can help do it for you. So email marketing gives you the power to reach potential clients or customers already interested in what you're selling. So these people have usually already visited your website or your social media accounts. Then you can sign them up directly from those sources, giving you more opportunities to sell to them.
Almost two-thirds of emails are opened using a mobile device. This means that email marketing is one of the best tools for business because it can be opened wherever they are. Typically, as soon as I get a notification on my phone, I'm one of those people that has to open it straight away. I can't leave it. I open it and delete it, or open it, read it and keep my emails fresh. So anything in my inbox is what needs dealing with, and anything else can be dealt with later. I think there are so many other people like that. So they're also open email, and then hopefully they'll click on it, they'll go to your website, and they'll buy from you. That's the ultimate goal.
You're then drip-feeding information by reaching those customers and using email to do so, which is cost-effective. You're constantly at the forefront of their minds when they come to the point of actually needing your products or services. By emailing them regularly, you're going to be coming up at the forefront of their minds every time they might need you, or they can tell their friends about you. When they receive that email, they might think I don't need them right now and brushed it off. But if you are consistent with your email marketing and you're doing it regularly, then you can always be in their minds. Then they may also refer you to their friends or other people that might need your services or products.
A large percentage of people in the UK like to receive promotional emails from companies and anyone they do business with. So you might go online shopping, and you'll sign up to their promotional stuff and see what they've got, and you're always be getting emails from them. You can unsubscribe at any time, but those people you've signed up to are people you're already interested in. It's the same when people sign up for your emails. They're signing up because they are interested in something about you, something that you offer that you can give people. Your potential buyers can suss you out before making any purchase. I'm going to talk again about Know, Like and Trust as it has a lot to do with marketing. I do talk about it a lot, but I like to drum it into people. By email marketing, you're getting your potential clients or new clients to know, like, and trust you because they will receive your emails and find out more about you. They're getting to know about what you're doing, about who you are, and you're going to give that to them in a way that they can understand. You might add to the email a video link or a link that takes them somewhere they can get to know you even more. So the potential with email marketing is massive if you think about it. It's something that you want to be doing if you're not doing it already. Get a list together. It doesn't matter how small it is, start now is my advice to you.
Email is almost 40 times more effective than Facebook, and Twitter combined in helping businesses to acquire new customers. So that is massive. That's a great factoid there. Think of how many people use Facebook and Twitter. It's a lot. Facebook is huge, and email marketing is also hugely successful.
What you want to do when you are sending your emails is also check the insights for it. People write something out quickly, so they don't really think about a strategy or thing too much into it. They'll get it sent just because it's sent, and then they don't look at any of the insights or results, anything like that. So you need to make sure that you're checking those insights, and then you can learn what works and check how your emails are performing. You might want to change things up a bit if something's not working so well, and then the things that are working well do more of. That sounds simple. But it is, it is simple. If you do it consistently, and you do it well, you're going to get clients. It also helps you have a better understanding of what interests your audience.
MailChimp will tell you what people are clicking on, where, how many times they've clicked on it. So it narrows down into the nitty-gritty. You need to make sure you're putting more links on things, and knowing where your customers are going, can help with the following emails. So don't just post and run. Think of it as a strategy, and you want to make sales from this.
So there are a variety of email marketing companies out there. But we highly recommend using MailChimp, it's probably the number one system/platform, and we use it a lot with our clients. It's an all in one integrated marketing platform for small businesses to grow their business on their terms. It's simple to use, and they offer a free plan. So if you're new to business, you haven't got much money, as I said at the beginning, they offer you a free plan. That plan is more than enough to get started. It covers 2000 subscribers, and you can get so much with the free one.
As well as creating the campaigns, you can set up automations, which saves you time and keeps your processes slick. Of course, they are limited on the free one, but you can upgrade at any time to add more people to the list as your business grows and as you want to invest.
They also offer templates that look professional, and they're designed to help ensure that you receive a high open rate. You can put your content in there. You can customise each one how you wish. You can include your logos, your branding colours etc., By generating these emails, you can guarantee a result. So whenever you need to boost your sales or have a sales campaign, you need to be posting these emails out at those times or just before and have your sales grow, and then you will reap the rewards.
The automations are primarily on the paid version, but you can do certain ones like the welcome email sequence. I always recommend starting with that one. Anytime someone new comes to your email, they expect an automated one to come through to confirm that they have been added. So that's something that the free one can do, but it's enough to get you started. If you're then sending emails consistently after that, you're pretty much all right.
So if you are interested in learning more about MailChimp, we run a MailChimp group masterclass. So if you've got a few of you that maybe want to get involved, we can do group masterclasses. We don't have any particular date, so if you send us a message, we can get in touch with you and put a date together and get a few people together. We also do one on one as well. So if you are interested, pop us a message, and we can help. In general, in the master class, we covered MailChimp for businesses using the free version of MailChimp. We also offer an explanation of what else that you can do on there, should you wish to upgrade, and we include time for Q&A with show and tell answers, so you're getting the most out of it. If you want a really quick way of learning more about MailChimp, this is the best way to do it. If you want to book that and there are any particular areas you want to explore in training, write down some questions, and we can go through that with you at the training. To book, go to our website www.dolphin-outsourcing.co.uk and head to our services page and scroll down to MailChimp. Click on that, and you can read a bit more there. Or you can contact us to find out more.
We will look forward to speaking with you next week.