Emails are so well integrated into our modern lives that sending them out and receiving them have already become autopilot. The fact that emails have been around as early as the birth of the Internet proves their invaluable utility, especially in online marketing. These days they’re still one of the main tools used for business communication and marketing.
Outsourcing Angel’s Karina Syahdarma joins founder Linh Podetti in this very insightful discussion on Email Marketing. They deliver helpful pointers on making the most out of email marketing campaigns and shed more light on how virtual assistants help you become more effective with your email marketing efforts.
Having started with Outsourcing Angel five years ago, Karina’s helped build a lot of content for OA throughout the years. Her combined love for marketing, social media, and online marketing, together with her experiences in the field makes her a great resource person on the topic.
Karina explains that there are three types of emails a client can send to their target market: engagement emails, promotional emails, and newsletter type of emails. Each type is unique in its use and purpose and distinguishing one from the other will help you be more effective in communicating with your target market.
• Engagement emails are emails that a client gets upon getting on board, either through subscription or after purchasing a product/ service. This type of email provides more information about your product/service and can also be a way for you to reach clients who have not purchased yet.
• Promotional emails are the type of emails that need to be done carefully due to their tendency to cause annoyance. These emails are a hard selling tool that you use to promote and entice your market. These need to be planned and used cautiously to prevent unsubscription from existing clients. With promotional emails, you also need to ensure that the information you’re giving away ultimately reaches the right person and not to your competitors.
• Newsletter emails are educational in nature. They are often designed to look like a magazine/ brochure to provide information and updates often internally to staff and to clients. Use these emails to touch base with your stakeholders on a regular basis (best sent once a month) to make them feel appreciated and updated about what’s going on.
Having a VA to send out personal emails to your database can be very effective for your business but VAs can do so much more. They can help set-up your marketing tools for an email campaign. They can help you segregate and build your client list, research articles or topics to send out to your database, even design your template. If a VA knows your business well enough, he/she can plan your content ahead of time, work on a calendar and schedule sending them out in advance. A VA can also help monitor results of your campaign and handle the follow-ups.
If you’re just starting out with email marketing, it helps to know where you should begin. You start by building your database first, gathering them from past and existing clients, people you met, people who inquired about your products and services and segmenting them accordingly. A database can be too large to work with manually, so you will need email marketing tools / software to get the job done. MailChimp is highly recommended for starters. It is easy to use, not to mention that their service is free for the first 1,000 emails. As you grow your database and advance with your email marketing efforts, you can move on to more advanced platforms such as Active Campaign.
After signing up to your choice of software, you can proceed to build your content. Keep in mind that the information you provide should always be market sensitive, taking into consideration your purpose of communicating to your target market.
Given all these tips on how to get started, handle email marketing campaigns and insights on how VAs can efficiently help you get more things done for your business, email marketing is proven to remain very relevant today. Karina goes on to share that email is still the best way to reach out to your target market in terms of feeding the right information about your products/ services or even communicate your promotion. Additionally, always treat your list as gold because it is never easy to get hold of people’s email. And if you’re still growing your database, focus on creating more value for your target market such as giving away a valuable free product they can both use and enjoy. Having incentives like these will not guarantee automatic purchase but it may convince your market enough to believe in you, which can, later on, lead to a buying behaviour.
We hope these knowledge and insights on handling email marketing proved its relevance and importance to your business. Email marketing, after all, may be here to stay for a very long time and it could be just what you need to help grow and market your business online.
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