Why Use Email Marketing?
Email marketing has long been one of the best investments a small business can make. The return on investment is tremendous, and serves the purpose of keeping your business top of mind with your customers. Email marketing can serve many purposes such as:
- Staying in regular communication with your customers
- Generating leads for your business
- Driving traffic to key pages on your website
- Highlighting information important to your customers
- Staying relevant to your customer’s needs
Email Marketing Guidelines
Many small businesses have trouble coming up with content ideas for their website. Here are some guidelines to use when writing your email content:
- Topics should be short
- Paragraphs should be no longer than two or three sentences
- Use bullets/lists regularly
- Avoid spammy subject lines and content
- The content should be valuable to the reader
- Topics should be timely
- Content should be easy to read
- The subject should incite the reader to open the email
- Offer rewards for customer referrals
- Give your readers a reason to open future newsletters
- Ask yourself “what do my customers need to know about?”
- Don’t focus on promoting your business as much as providing value to the reader
Email Newsletter Ideas
Below is a list of ideas that can be used to generate newsletter emails to your customer base.
Company-Centric Newsletter Ideas:
- Recent awards, certifications, licenses acquired
- New additions to your services or products
- Milestones, anniversaries, goals achieved
- Highlight the employee of the month
- Promote recent videos
- A personal note from the owner/CEO/Customer Care Manager
- New product reveals
- Customer thank you for years of support/anniversaries/etc.
- Customer testimonials
- Advice/instructions on how to maintain/service your products
- Promote your mobile app
- Survey or polls to learn about your customers
- Inside information/insights about company leadership team
- Highlight positive newspaper/online articles about your company
- Jobs you’re hiring for
- Company history
- Charitable support/contributions
- Promote your social channels
Customer-Centric Newsletter Ideas:
- Customer events
- New office space/building
- How-to’s
- Tips to help customers get more out of you products/services
- Sales, discounts or coupons
- Case study about how customers benefit from your products/services
- Top 5/10/15 list of things your customers need to know
- Calendar of future events/deadlines
- Inspirational stories/quotes/photos
- Share an educational infographic
- Recommendations for how customers can leverage your products and services
- Questions and answers/FAQ
- Photos taken by customers
- Your customer loyalty program/exclusive benefits
Don’t forget to edit/re-purpose your blog posts, YouTube videos, LinkedIn articles, and Facebook posts as email newsletter content.
