Dream & Do

M is for MAIL [Z-A for Start-ups]

Z-A for Start-upsDream & DoComment

M is for MAIL

As in, ‘you’ve got mail’!

You know all those emails that you’re bombarded with every morning in your inbox? From websites and products you can’t even remember signing up for? They’re called email direct marketing campaigns, or EDMs.

Though it might seem annoying and a lot go to your junk, there’s a lot to be said for leveraging EDMs to grow your business and keep in touch with your client base. You can schedule email marketing campaigns to follow up after your customer has purchased a product, to send weekly or monthly newsletters, recommend your products, promote your latest blog post, and more. They can also be designed and customised to align with your visual brand identity.

A recurring template can also be used on most sites like MailChimp so you can use the same template, enter the new information, and churn something out in only a couple of hours. It’s incredibly efficient, especially when you have some stock to move or want to piggyback a current event by promoting a discount offer.

We spoke to Kate Toholka, online business coach, about how she uses EDMs to keep in constant contact with her clients and large social media following.

“EDMs are incredibly important to me. I see it as a conversation held in the written form so essentially it's about communicating with my audience as I would if I met them in person. It's a tool to building trust, which ultimately generates sales/clients. Most of us are time-poor yet procrastinators - we'd say 'I'll do that later'. By sending regular emails to my audience, I'm gently reminding them to take action - whether that's buying from me or learning something new about running an online business. Plus as great as social media is, your audience doesn't always see it. An email is more effective this way.”

Most of our clients use MailChimp, which can be easily set up to link to your email account. Once you’ve figured out how to capture emails on your website (such as through pop-up forms, as we talk about in Dream & Do's e-book - see below!), they can go directly to MailChimp. You can then schedule emails to go out and promote your product, service, blog, and just connect with your customers using a personal tone of voice and the latest news.

The MailChimp ‘campaigns’ can also be designed and personalised to look striking and on-brand. Similar to scheduling social media posts, having regular scheduled emails that go out to your database helps keep your business at the forefront of your customer’s minds.

Kate Toholka’s recently moved from MailChimp to Active Campaign, and hers are some of our favourite EDMs, so that might be worth checking out too. She says: “I use Active Campaign for EDM and CRM all tied neatly into one. It's been such a great tool in communicating with my audience as well as building my audience.”

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