How To Do Email Marketing For A Start-up Or Small Business

October 13, 2013

Email marketing can be an extremely powerful tool to re-engage your customers. In fact, it is one of the preferred online marketing techniques for savvy online marketers. It is a great way to reach out and re-engage your community, and can also be a good way to reach new clients in case you decide to buy existing email address lists. In this article we will cover a number of strategies and give tips and ideas to help you become a great email marketer.

Growing your mailing list on your own

Every business should be growing the list of their client emails. On your website you should have a call to action for your users or clients to give you their email addresses so that you can send them updates, discounts, or news about what you are doing. Growing a list of people who want to stay in touch this way can be great because these customers are some of the most engaged users you have. And you want to maintain a relationship with them and send email updates to them regularly. You can keep regularly re-engaging them and reminding them about your business. The more successful your email marketing campaigns are to extend the duration of your company’s relationship with its customers, the more money you will make from those customers.

Buying email lists as an of email marketing strategy

I don’t recommend buying email lists because the people on those lists who will get email from you will not know who you are, and will likely not even open the emails. They will likely just flag those marketing emails as spam. The only time to consider buying email lists is if they are extremely well targeted to match your target audience. Even then it is sort of questionable because the truth is that it is nearly impossible to determine the quality of the people on the receiving end of those emails until after you have emailed them. Also, if the list is very cheap and affordable, then it can be a low-risk option as well.

Do not email by yourself, use a mass-emailing service

Even though you can just send the emails from your own email account, you do not want to do that. Your email account will be flagged as spam by the major email providers like Gmail and Hotmail. After that, most of your emails (even to people you know) will be very likely to end up in the spam folder.

Instead of sending your email campaigns from your own email, use a service like MailChimp. MailChimp allows a list of up to 2,000 to be emailed free. After that, MailChimp charges a small fee per additional person. But their service is worth the extra fee. It helps your emails avoid the spam folder, and MailChimp has many pre-designed email templates that will increase engagement of the people who receive your email.

When sending, the email title is extremely important

People who receive your email will probably be busy and/or skeptical. The subject line of the email is what convinces them to open the email. Make sure the title is catchy, interesting, engaging, and not too spammy looking. And keep the subject line no more than 50 characters. 30-45 characters is probably the ideal range.

Additionally, many email providers scan for marketing terms like free, now, or for use of explanation marks and similar things that appear in spam email. If the content of the email you send has too many such signals, the major email service providers might send those messages into the spam folder. Look up the full lists of those terms online and try to avoid them in your subject line and use them minimally in the body of your email.

The body of the email

Once people open your email, the body of your email should have a call to action for them to do something that you want them to do. Usually it is to go to some website and perform some action. But it can’t be all about the call to action. You also have to make the body of the email compelling and interesting so that people get engaged with it.

Email is great because people keep their email addresses for a long time

Social networks change every few years. But people tend to keep their email addresses for a long time. So once you have someone’s email address, you are able to use it for a long time.

Common Email Mistakes

While we have gone over some good-practice things you can do in your email marketing efforts, there are some common and simple email marketing mistakes that you can make which can really derail your email marketing efforts. Here is a video on the common email marketing mistakes to avoid.

http://youtu.be/NnoTBo12pBE

Further Marketing Resources

For more business-starting resources, please take a look at our business planning mobile apps. Here is the iOS business plan app and here is the Android business plan app. Additionally, here is the iOS marketing app. And here is the Android marketing app. And here are our business apps on the Kindle. And here is an article where I give the argument that our Android apps are the best business apps on Android.

And please check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel where we cover many marketing topics.