Whenever I Ask My Students What Skill They Need To Master In Order To Build Their Business, Social Media Is Always The First That Comes To Mind
I will admit that I truly believe Facebook and Instagram to be the best social media platforms out there to attract new clients and potential customers, however there is another little tool that is WAY better for maintaining your existing customers or tribe as I like to call it.
It’s way less expensive to retain an existing client than it is to attract a new one. I think the constant cycle of looking, hoping and praying for new clients is the single most stressful thing that any business endures.
Wouldn’t it be great if your base customers just stayed stable so that you could rely on just referrals to provide consistent growth?
That happens through the magic of my favorite marketing tool: Email Marketing!
If you think Email Marketing is old and done with – Think again!
Emails are like gold and that is how I want you to think about it.
If emails were old and done with then why is it every time you go to a store or website, they ask you for it ?
Your email address is your digital identity. It is not like a business card that gets printed in 100’s and 1000’s. Most people have 1 or 2 primary email accounts that they manage in some cases many more.
If you follow any of the big businesses, you will see they all want you to provide your email and some point of the conversation. It could be to confirm your order, to register for a rewards program, to have your receipt emailed to you and for a number of other reasons. Multi-billion dollar businesses don’t collect emails for fun. They do it because they know that email marketing is the single most effective way to build a longterm relationship with consumers.
I know some of you are already thinking, I’m great on social media, I use my Instagram, I use my Facebook, I have a website, why do I even need to use email marketing? There are three reasons why truly successful businesses in any niche use email marketing to grow their customers and I want you to understand the huge impact it can have on your business:
Email Is Totally Free And What Can Be Better Than Free Online Marketing
Now I started in my business in 2015, when email marketing was fully known and used by many, but back in day almost 9-10 year ago (form the time of me writing this article) businesses spent countless hours handwriting notes, thank you cards, postcards to clients their clients each month and on occassions. Think about the money spent in stationery and stamps. But today there are plenty of email marketing systems that are 100% free and will save you tons of time and money vs hand written or even text communication. If you have a small email list Mailchimp is a great place to start. I however now use Aweber as it works very well for my business.
An Email Sent Will Be Seen By Almost 10X More Of Your Guests That A Social Post Will Ever Be
The average adult checks their emails six times a day. I know that I do. With all of the algorithms now in place on both Instagram and Facebook, the average social media post is seen by 1%-3% of your followers. Email marketers can see anywhere from 20% – over 60% email open rate. That increase is HUGE. With email, there is no algorithm so they’ll at least see it in their inbox and then choose to either open the message or not.
You can grow and nurture your existing business much more effectively through email mail
While social media can be a wonderful way to attract new guests, when you want to run a promotion, nurture the existing guest relationship or distribute a mass message, email wins every time. I don’t suggest using Instagram for announcing promotions, service offerings, price increases, last minute openings or scheduling/availability updates. Those would be all the things that can hurt your social media reach, but are great to announce through email.
So did I convince you yet that email marketing is pretty freaking awesome? Good!!
Okay, so how do you start?
What campaign should you even be sending? And this sounds like a lot of work, how do I make it easy? First of all it’s not a lot of work. If it takes you more than an hour, a month to do email marketing, you’re doing something wrong. But I want to share with you today three campaigns that will make a huge difference in your business.
1- The Promotional Email
Most businesses find this to be the easiest email marketing technique to apply. One of my service based business clients who is a physiotherapist uses this effectively to manage her schedule. When she notices she has a slow day during the week, she sends out an email blast with a discount offer for the time she is looking to fill. Suddenly her openings get filled up. Pretty awesome Right! Now you might be wondering “why can’t I just do a promotional post on Instagram or Facebook”? Both of those platforms have decided they don’t like promotional posts, so their system actually skims your comments looking for promotional words, you’ll be forced out of the feed and your future posts will reach less and less of your followers. This is why email marketing is KING and totally wins when it comes to promotions.
2 – Annual Special Offer
This one is like magic. Annually we send out an email with a discounts on my service offerings. We are always so good about offering discounts and promotions to our new clients, but it’s really important to show our existing clients some love too. In addition to the gift for our current clients we also include a promotional offer that looks beautiful and can be forwarded freely. We encourage clients to forward the promotion along to anybody who might be looking for our services and also use this opportunity to remind our clients about our referral program. We know our clients feel appreciated do not hesitate to recommend our services to their networks. Guess what.. this can only be good for your business. Try it, I’m sure you’ll see results.
3 – The Email Newsletter
Usually when I say the word “newsletter”, people are instantly turned off. It sounds dated, it sounds complicated, it sounds chunky, it sounds way too hard and who is even going to read that? Once you learn to create effective newsletters, your clientele won’t just read it, they’ll actually look forward to it. Also if you’re doing a newsletter correctly it shouldn’t be boring and it shouldn’t take you more than half an hour every month. It’s really simple, you just have to follow the right format. This is the tool you will use to feature your work. To show to your customers some of your big wins and why they should continue to work with you.
3 – The Email Newsletter
Usually when I say the word “newsletter”, people are instantly turned off. It sounds dated, it sounds complicated, it sounds chunky, it sounds way too hard and who is even going to read that? Once you learn to create effective newsletters, your clientele won’t just read it, they’ll actually look forward to it. Also if you’re doing a newsletter correctly it shouldn’t be boring and it shouldn’t take you more than half an hour every month. It’s really simple, you just have to follow the right format. This is the tool you will use to feature your work. To show to your customers some of your big wins and why they should continue to work with you.