Email Marketing Best Practices When You Don’t Have a Marketing Team

In a small business, it can be hard to staff one employee dedicated to marketing, let alone an entire team. But you still need to market your business, so what do you do? Luckily, there are a few tricks that can increase your marketing power without increasing your employee count. Here are a few email marketing best practices when you don’t have a marketing team:

Automate, Automate, Automate

Wherever you can, let bots do the heavy lifting. Automation can help you accomplish more with less daily effort. Set up automated class reminders, account notifications, birthday greetings and more. The workflows require very little maintenance once they’ve been set up, and you won’t have to worry that information is getting missed.

There are countless services to help you set up email automation. Pike13 partners with three–MailChimp, Emma, and BrandBot–to offer options to our customers.

Use Lists to Target Specific Client Segments

The clients in your Advanced Guitar class probably won’t care that the Beginner’s Piano class has been moved to Thursday nights. Set up email lists so that clients receive only information that is relevant to them. If your clients receive too many emails that don’t pertain to them, they may start marking your email address as spam.

Use Your Clients’ Networks

People are more likely to try out a business that has been recommended to them by a friend. This means your clients are your most effective marketers.

• Send email offers that are for them but can also be forwarded on to a friend.
• Use email to ask for online reviews.
• Set up a more formal referral program to reward clients for referring others. 

Automation can allow one person to harness the power of an entire team, but always remember that the most important thing is providing value. Use email automation to distribute content that is useful and relevant while saving yourself hours of administrative time.