Emails are still the main mode of communication online, even in the age of Social Media. Digital Marketers still value email communications as it still brings the largest ROI in their marketing budget. Big companies understand this, that’s why they invest so much on their email content, design and platform.
You, as a small business, can still benefit from email marketing. In fact, no matter how small or localized your business is, you SHOULD be doing email marketing. A good email marketing program is not just typing or scanning your product or service brochure and sending it to your mailing list. Here are the 10 marketing emails you should be sending to your leads and customers:
1. Welcome emails
Welcome emails should be the starting point of your emails. Whenever your customer signs up for a mailing list, you should be able to send a Welcome to them. Much like in your store, a welcome email makes your customer feel welcome.
A Welcome email should contain more information about your business as a whole, not on a particular product. You want your customer to have an overview about you and what you can do for them.
2. Top-of-mind emails
Top of mind emails are designed to remind your customers about you on a regular interval, preventing them from forgetting why they signed up on your emails in the first place. These emails also initiates engagement to your customers, making them more interested about you and your products or services.
Top-of-mind emails can be your newsletter or a general product catalogue that you can send to your customers monthly or bi-monthly.
3. Conversion emails / Abandoned cart
A conversion email encourages your customer to go through the purchase process completely. For online shops, it is often called Abandoned cart – as their customers may “abandon” or leave their shopping carts without purchasing. For off-line businesses, conversion emails are designed follow-up inquiries made by customers.
Conversion emails should remind your customers why they are interested in the first place, and why going through the purchase would be beneficial for them. Some businesses offer discount coupons to encourage customers to close the sale.
4. Promotional emails
Promotional emails differ than top-of-mind emails on two points: first is its schedule, as this are usually sent out whenever you have promotions or special occasions and, second, its purpose, as this is designed to accelerate a purchase. These emails should be well-timed and provide promotional offers and discounts which can only be availed only within a short amount of time.
Birthday discounts and holiday promotions such as Fathers’ Day discounts are good promotion emails that you can implement for your business. For B2B businesses, a right offer when near closing of a deal can differentiate you winning the account and losing out the sale.
5. Product-focused emails
Unlike top-of-mind emails, a focused email should be able to provide your customer a particular product or service that you offer. This is an opportunity for your business to pitch in a specific product, its benefits (and drawbacks) and compare it with your competitors. This email campaign should address a specific problem of your customer and telling them that you can solve their problem.
For focused emails to be effective, you should be able to determine the exact product or service your customer is interested in. If a customer visits a particular product page on your website multiple times, then it’s a good indication that you can send him about your product.
6. Onboarding emails
Once you have made your customer to purchase your product or service, it is not the time to stop communicating to them. In contrary, this should be the time for you to be able to provide your customers valuable information about the product or service they have availed so that they could get started on their own.
Onboarding emails can be more information about the product, frequently asked questions, warranty information, next steps, or other external resources that will help your customer understand your product or service more.
7. Ask for feedback emails
Most online businesses, especially hotels and restaurants, thrive for good online reviews. The only way you will know that your business – product or service – (or your people) is doing great is through asking for feedback from your customers. Ask for Feedback emails allow you to adjust your business to improve your best qualities, or diagnose what’s wrong about you. Negative feedbacks is just as important as a raving review.
If your industry has a popular review website e.g. tripsadvisor.com for hotels, you may want to encourage your customers to write a review for you and reward them for doing so. Else, you can redirect your customers to a private form that they can fill up at their own convenience.
8. Up-sell and cross-sell emails
Fastfood restaurants make a lot of profit just by asking you to upsize your meal. You can also upsell a product that is related to your customer’s purchase in order to increase their lifetime value to your business. Cross-sell is offering a different product or service.
In the airline industry, a good upsell is to provide you in-flight meals or seat upgrade while a cross-sell is suggesting a nice hotel where you can stay during your trip.
9. Renewal emails
Most service providers have service contracts that expires after a certain period. Renewal emails allows you to remind your existing customers to renew their contracts. This would make your customers less likely to miss out on the contract renewals, or move to a competitor. For product-focused businesses, a renewal email may inform their customers that their product is reaching its end-of-life (e.g. getting old and obsolete). This is an opportunity for your business to introduce a new product or model as well.
10. Forward-to-a-Friend emails
There’s nothing more effective marketing than a friend’s recommendation. Forward-to-a-friend (FTAF) emails are designed to utilize word-of-mouth marketing and bring in more business through satisfied customers. FTAF emails usually asks your customer to fill up a form to add the names and email addresses of their friends. Do note that emails from FTAF forms are not considered as part of your mailing list until they have interacted with your business.
FTAF emails are more effective if you are able to reward both your referrer and referred friend, but, in most cases, people recommend because they liked your product, or the experience you have provided for them.
As you may have imagined, you can automate sending these emails. There are proper tools to send out marketing emails such as Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, but we prefer Active Campaign as it is more robust and is able to create more complex automated email programs. Would you like to try it for yourself? We can give you a FREE demo account for you to start with. Send us a message and we will get in touch with you!
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