Your Email Strategy
NOW THAT YOU HAVE THEIR ATTENTION, YOU NEED TO MAINTAIN COMMUNICATIONS.
THIS IS WHERE EMAIL CAMPAIGNS AND NEWSLETTERS COME INTO PLAY.
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE A GOOD SCRIPT.
Professional Email Address & Signature
Nothing says "buy my product" like an email address of "goofygirl@aol.com".
If you're ready to get serious about your business and scale to the next level, one of the easiest and most impactful things you can do is get a professional email address for your business. Its a simple process and there are multiple companies that will help you make a professional email.
We include a professional email address with the website and domains we build for our marketing clients and we're happy to help you too. (I recommend G-Suite through Google personally)
Once you have an email address, make a clean professional signature and your emails are already going to be better received.
Contact List Development
"Your network is your net worth" -Tim Sanders
If you want to grow your business, you need to build a larger outreach to more people. As you do this, you need to keep all your new contacts organized. This way you can keep track of buyers, sellers, partners, prospects, referrals etc.
As you begin marketing for your business, it is crucial that you figure out a way to record and track all these new relationships as you go. (More on CRM's below)
Email Script Writing
Most communications within your business are repeats of the same conversation again and again with clients and customers or with employees or suppliers. Each order, each delivery, each scheduling is very similar. The first way to save time is by tracking all the questions that people usually have and creating a FAQ sheet. Send this out to the respective audience and you'll save hours of explaining.
The second way to skip over repeating yourself again and again is to write up email scripts for the conversations that happen often. Answer the question in detail once, and then save it in your email draft folder. The next time someone asks you the same question, you just copy it from the draft folder and send it out.
For extra efficiency, label the subject line with the question so you can easily find the answer in your folder.
Email Newsletter- Strategy, Template & Content
Email newsletters gained a lot of popularity in the last couple of years to the point where I get 5-10 per month from different companies. Of those newsletters there are only a couple I open with any kind of regularity. Newsletters work better for some industries than others and take a lot of skill (and an experienced copy writer) to make effective.
If you decide newsletters are going to be a part of your business marketing plan, then the first obstacle to face is not going to the spam folder. In order to legally send out newsletters to your contacts, there are laws you must follow. Often times the requirements cause your email to go straight into the spam folder. The next step is getting your email opened with a catchy and worthwhile subject line. If the customer does open the email, then you need to move them to take action.
Newsletters are not as simple as sending out an email blast to everyone and making money. Do your research first and practice on smaller samples of your contact list before you jump into the whole list.
Email Communication Management
The secret to good business is replying to your emails. With everything else you're doing to run and grow your business, it can be overwhelming if not impossible to reply to all the emails you get throughout the day.
We can help take some of that weight off your shoulders by paring out the emails that are essential for you to handle versus the ones that we can take care of for you. Often times, the emails can be responded to using scripts or answering simple questions.
Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)
Your CRM is whatever method you use to manage all the people you interact with. It can be a custom made tool or it can be a handwritten leather journal under your pillow but the only way a CRM is helpful is if you actually use it. You need to make sure all new contacts are added and that every time you or someone from your team communicates with them, it gets recorded.
This can be automated in a lot of cases and other times it needs to be done manually. If you really want to feel the benefit of a much larger network from marketing, you need to be able to handle larger volumes of people.