The term small business marketing encompasses many strategies ...

Email marketing is one of the oldest and most effective ways to get new customers online. There are many reasons for this: it?s easy for the customer to use, and it?s easy for the business to produce. Provided you gauge the interests of your contact list correctly, it can be a simple tool for getting more sales than you otherwise would have.

While the concept is simple, the practice is a bit more complex. Your emails need to be interesting or enticing enough to make customers want to read them. They need to change over time ? if you send the same thing over and over, they?ll lose interest, and you?ll lose customers. also, there are laws around what counts as a genuine contact. If you don?t follow these, your business could be weighted with substantial penalties.

The following are six things to consider before your business gets started with email marketing.

The basic function of email marketing is to distribute information about what your business does or will be doing in the future.

?sometimes it could just be for the promotion of a new product or an event,? says Brent Chandler, founder of Zwift. ?It?s all about communication ? building up awareness for whatever it is that the restaurant?s trying to promote.?

This might be as simple as a loyalty system that rewards return customers, or an ongoing series of e-books that educates recipients in a way that relates to your industry. The key with email is to offer something that customers past, present and future will value in some way. If a curious visitor signs up because they can see an obvious benefit, then your business has one more potential customer.

Before you get started, decide what you want to achieve with email marketing, and consider what you have to offer your customers to help make that happen. then, think about how you can sustain their interest over time with different messages that play into the main goal.

For a retail business, the simplest method is to offer discounts and promotions on a variety of different products, for the purpose of driving more sales. A service-based business might not gain as much traction from sending out offers. instead, a series of emails that offered free advice might be a more enticing incentive for people to sign up.

?one of the key things for businesses to understand when they?re creating an email marketing strategy is to put yourself in the shoes of your customer,? says Linda Delphin managing director of Marketing Space. ?I always come back to what?s needed for the customer to find that valuable information. actually taking customers along the journey of why they should be excited about a product or a service definitely has a role to play in email marketing.?

Once you?ve identified what it is you want to achieve, you need to set about putting together a strategy.

If you approach email marketing as a series of one-off messages, you?re missing the point. It?s best to think of it as an ongoing campaign that?s going to keep recipients? attention from week to week. If your messaging lacks focus or is too varied, you?ll lose subscribers.

Email marketing isn?t the kind of activity that sees immediate results. often recipients will stay dormant on a list for a long time before acting on their interest. This is why it?s a bad idea to decide what?s going into an email marketing campaign the day you send it out. If you take time to consider what your audience is interested in, and draw up a plan for content that will hold their attention over a longer period of time, you will be much more likely to get queries and new sales.

?From the perspective of content, it?s really as simple as really understanding who your target market is and drilling down as far as you can into that, so you know what keeps them awake at night, you know what they?re bitching about at barbecues, you know what their biggest dream is, and you can talk to that,? says Victoria Judge, owner of Expert Agency. ?When you make that emotional connection, and you feel that you understand them, that?s when they?ll become your customer.?

The emotional connection she?s referring to needn?t be something as complex as a beautifully written blog post. There can be a basic emotional pull to a message like ?50% off?, provided you send it to the right people.

?Typically, you?d be looking at things like what sort of special you?ve got or what discount ? something that?s actually going to gel with customers.? says Marketing Space?s Delphin. ?just saying ?we?ve got these products, here you go? is not the purpose of email marketing. It?s really to drive something so customers feel like there?s something to entice them into buying or responding.?

The most crucial part of any email marketing effort is the database of contacts you have to send to.

?Email marketing is primarily about having a database ? a list of contacts of people that have expressed an interest in what you do,? says Expert Agency?s Judge.

The quality of a database is also important in email marketing. A quality database is one that?s already aware of your business and what it does. its contacts are more likely to open emails and investigate their contents than ignore or delete them, or unsubscribe altogether. If the contacts aren?t expecting emails from your business, they?re not likely to respond positively. If they are expecting them, then you can assume that they?re interested in your business in some way.

?we have a saying in the industry that you keep communicating with your database through your email marketing until they either buy or they unsubscribe,? says Judge. ?Either of those is a good result, because you don?t want people sitting on your database that are never going to buy what you?ve got.?

Typically, the main part of your database should be made up of existing customer?s emails. Pre-existing customers already know what your business does and how it?s relevant to them, so they have a way of relating to and categorising any marketing material that your business sends them.

The real goal of email marketing is to gain new customers, though. To do this, you need new contacts. How you go about finding these is very important when it comes to maintaining a quality list.

One good way to get new subscribers is to have a sign up form on your website. Content management systems like WordPress often have plugins (add-ons) that help you do this easily.

?You need a web designer who?s going to understand that email marketing software, and he can put the form on your website and on your social media, so that you can start collecting,? says Judge.

To make signing up attractive to new subscribers, you need to show them that the email will be valuable to them in some way. usually, free educational information or product discounts are incentive enough.

It is possible to buy lists of contacts that are relevant to your business, but doing so compromises the quality of your database. bought contacts are never explicitly interested in your business, which means they?re likely to be cold, unresponsive leads. It?s also difficult to tell how relevant a bought list is to your particular business, or even how many of the email addresses are still active.

It might not seem like it, but the time of day, and day of the week, which you choose to send your email is very important.

?at Zwift, we promote restaurants,? says Zwift?s Chandler. ?Targeting someone at 9pm at night [is unwise] because the customers have already eaten, and are maybe not too willing to absorb more food information after a big meal. we try and target people at three and four in the afternoon when three-thirty-itis comes around. If it?s before dinner, they might be thinking about what they?re going to be ordering later on in the day.?

People also respond differently to different sorts of information depending on whether they?re at work or at home. The contents of the email should determine the time of send.

?It?s important to make sure that you?ve got enough time for the customer to not just read the email, but to absorb the information and decide how they?re going to act on it without being stressed that they?re going to run out of time,? continues Chandler, ?unless that?s the kind of campaign you?re going for.?

It?s essential that every contact in your email database has given you permission to market to them via email. This is relevant to the legality of your campaign, but also to how successful it?s going to be.

It?s illegal to send email marketing campaigns to people that haven?t given you permission to do so. Legally, permission is defined in two ways. Implied consent is when you receive a person?s details for any form of business-related communication. It?s less preferable to use implied contacts for marketing ? they might not want sales messages, and so may be much less responsive to them. The other form of permission is express or explicit consent, which means the recipient has indicated they would like to receive marketing information from your business.

Express consent is much better for email marketing than implied consent. If a list is full of people who haven?t given express consent, they?re going to be much less responsive to marketing messages. This means that you?ll get a much lower rate of response, and effectively waste more of your time putting emails together.

The worst-case scenario in sending unsolicited emails is that your business will be penalised by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

?Make sure that everybody that goes into that database has given you permission to contact them in that way,? says Chandler. ?It?s the most important thing. A reputation can disappear overnight with one email that you didn?t get permission for.?

Once you have the beginnings of a database, it?s time to investigate tools for actually sending emails to its contacts. It?s really important not to think of things like MacMail, Outlook or Gmail as adequate email marketing tools. as soon as your database is larger than 30 contacts, you need something more comprehensive.

?Some people still use spreadsheets,? says Expert Agency?s Judge. ?It scares me. If you start emailing from a spreadsheet, you?re laying yourself open to get sued.?

Systems like Mailchimp, AWeber and Campaign Monitor all offer simple, effective ways of sending email out to substantial databases. these systems can also tell you how well your emails are received ? how many of them were opened, how many people clicked through to your website, where in the email they clicked, and how many people unsubscribed altogether. This information is vitally important for the ongoing success of a campaign. If a particular product offer or blog post topic is well received, then you can alter your future emails to cater to that interest.

While these systems usually offer a series of templates on which to base the design of your email, it?s best if you pay the money and get a designer to create a good-looking template for you to use. This will make your business appear appropriately professional, which will lessen unsubscriptions.

Finally, remember that things like Mailchimp, although they are rewarding to play with and have lots of features, are not going to make your emails good. If you create a strong database of receptive contacts, and give them things they value and expect from your business, you?re likely to find success with email marketing.

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