Email marketing is a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes, but you have to put in the effort to do it right!
How Email Marketing Gives You an Edge
Email marketing has no shortage of benefits that make it worth the effort to do it right:
- Depending on the scale of your email marketing, it can cost you nothing but some time (no postage!) – though paying for email automation software can make your life a lot easier if you’re sending regular messages frequently and to a large audience. It’ll also let you track performance in detail.
- Email marketing allows you to specially tailor your messages to different segments of your market to maximize their value and their open rates, as opposed to running a print ad in a magazine, for example, which is a one-size-fits-all message. Email marketing gives you more control over who sees what content, increasing its effectiveness.
- Email marketing can be accurately and immediately measured. While it’s virtually impossible to measure the exact engagement of a print ad, when you send a mass email through an email marketing program, you get performance stats in real time. It’s easy to see who the email was delivered to, who opened it, who clicked through links and lots more important information that’ll help you craft successful campaigns.
Getting Your Audience Engaged
When it’s done right, email marketing is a simple, unobtrusive way to keep your target audience engaged with useful content. However, there are some best practices you must follow to make sure your emails don’t cross the line from helpful to annoying:
- Offering a spot on your website where visitors can subscribe to your email list ensures you’re sending to recipients who have given you their permission; sending unsolicited marketing emails to unsuspecting people is a good way to end up in the spam folder, hurting your sender reputation and wasting your time.
- It can help boost your engagement if recipients know when to expect your emails, so try to keep to as regular of a schedule as possible and be careful not to bombard them with an unreasonable amount of communication.
- Ask your audience for feedback on what type of content they’d like to see delivered to their inboxes. This might mean allowing them to suggest blog topics if you keep up a regular blog on your website, keeping them up to date on your latest product offerings, or letting them know when you’re hosting classes, open houses or other events at your screen printing shop.
Crafting Emails That Make an Impact
The unfortunate reality of high volume email marketing is that the majority of your messages will not be opened. But there are some steps you can take to stand out in crowded inboxes:
- First, you need to provide content that your recipients find valuable. That doesn’t mean you have to be emailing people coupons and discounts on a weekly basis (though promotions can be effective when done right). A link to a helpful blog post or an interesting and relevant video can be effective too.
- It’s important to create an eye-catching subject line to entice recipients into opening the message, but it must always accurately represent the content of the email. If you opened an email and found it was about something completely different than what’s described in the subject line, wouldn’t you be likely to send it to the trash or spam folder?
- Be careful – if too many of your emails end up in people’s spam folders, you can even be added to a blacklist, which reduces or even stops your email deliverability. It can be a pain to remove yourself from blacklists, so make sure your subject lines are never misleading to avoid being marked as spam.
It’s easy to get started with email marketing, or refine your existing practices to make sure you’re getting the best return on investment for your time and effort. If you’re doing it right, quality email marketing can help keep your existing customers and prospects engaged with your business in a way that feels natural to them and keeps your business first in mind when they’re ready to order.
Looking for some more tips on how to market your screen printing business digitally? Check out these blogs:
How to Effectively Market Your Screen Printing Business Online
Smart Strategies for Optimizing Your Screen Printing Business’s #1 Marketing Tool
Why Your Business Needs a Content Marketing Strategy
