Email Marketing for Dummies

Email marketing is one of those things that seems so easy in theory but is difficult to execute well. That’s because there are a lot of moving parts that need to work in harmony. But whether you run a gym, yoga studio, music school or any other service-based business, there are a few best practices for email marketing that remain the same. Here are a few tips to start email marketing at your business.

Capture client email addresses early

This applies to existing clients and prospects alike. After all, you can hardly start email marketing without any emails to market to! Require your clients to provide an email in order to sign up for any classes. This is important not only for the ability to contact your client in the event of a schedule change but also because you’ll now have a way to market additional classes to them.

It can be trickier to capture email addresses for prospects. You might include a sign up for more information form on your website, offer content that requires an email address to download or ask people to subscribe to a newsletter. Referral programs can be a great way to gain new email contacts from existing clients. Use all the methods at your disposal to gain new contacts.

Segment your contacts into lists

It’s important to start organizing your email contacts early so that you can segment content accordingly. At the very least, you’ll want to separate existing clients from prospects. You may also then choose to segment by age, sex, class interests, goals, or whatever other criteria you use to group clients at your business.

Write content for each segmented list

The point of organizing your contact lists is to be able to send targeted content. For example, if you run martial arts dojo and are hosting a special Self-Defense for Women class, you’ll want to heavily market the class to your female clients, but you wouldn’t want to bombard your male clients with information about a class they aren’t eligible to take.

This basically boils down to “don’t annoy your clients.” If you consistently send them content that they aren’t interested in, they’ll most likely unsubscribe from your list. But deliver content that’s relevant, and you’ll see open rates soar.

Always include a call to action

A marketing email suggests you want the client to take some sort of action, so make that action very clear. Large, obvious CTA buttons serve this purpose. Want the client to purchase a class? Your CTA should say something like “Enroll Now!” When the client clicks on the CTA, they should know exactly what the action means.

Write a subject line that grabs attention

Often the biggest barrier in email marketing is actually getting the client to open the email at all. For this reason, you want to make sure that your subject line is eye-catching. This doesn’t mean writing in all caps and including emojis. Instead, try keeping it short and using strong, description action words. Take a look at this list for some great tips on writing subject lines.

Automate where you can

There are powerful programs available to help you segment clients and automate email workflows. You might set up different workflows for long-term clients, new clients, and prospects, all with different content. It takes some effort up front, but once everything is set up you can focus on other parts of your business knowing that email is being taken care of. Pike13 partners with a few of these email marketing software providers–MailChimp, Emma, and BrandBot–to offer our customers access to these powerful automation tools.

Personalize as much as possible

Email automation allows for the inclusion of personalization tokens. That means your emails can automatically start with “Dear Mike” instead of “Dear friend” without you having to do a thing. To the client, this feels more personal, like the email is coming from a person rather than a business. They’ll be more likely to take action on the email when it seems like it was written just for them.

Don’t email too often

The worst thing that can happen is your client deciding that your email content is spam, and then blocking you. The best way to avoid this is not to send marketing emails too often. A business might avoid emailing too often by condensing content into a weekly or monthly newsletter. You don’t necessarily have to do this, but do strive to keep your marketing emails to once a week.

Use data to improve your emails

Once everything is segmented out the best way to improve your email marketing is to look at the data. Are your emails not being opened? Maybe you need to work on writing a more compelling subject line. Are people opening your email but not taking any action? Maybe the email is too long, not compelling enough, or the call-to-action isn’t clear enough. The data can tell you what’s going wrong–or what’s going right. When an email performs particularly well, study what you did differently to try to replicate that success.

At Pike13, we want to make sure our customers have all the tools they need to keep bringing in new business and keeping their most loyal customers coming back for more. To help with that we integrate with BrandBot.

BrandBot is an all-in-one communication hub that leverages your customer data in Pike13 to power relevant and effective messaging. They have helped turn companies into recognizable powerhouse brands with fiercely loyal customers.