Many businesses make the mistake of sending their customers a generic subscription confirmation, and a sporadic newsletter (at best!). By doing so, you’re missing a huge opportunity to build a relationship with your customers, and subsequently sell more!

From the minute your customers hit ‘subscribe,’ you should set up targeted, personal email marketing that includes the following elements:

1. A welcome email

When a customer subscribes to your list, they’re signalling that they want to start a relationship with you, so honour that!

Instead of sending them a generic confirmation, you should welcome them to your brand and let them know what to expect.  Ideally, a welcome email should include the following elements:

• What does your company do? What’s your mission? Your values? Keep it brief, but make sure you include enough information to get your customer excited;
• An invitation to whitelist your emails.  This is important, as it will ensure that your emails don’t go into your customer’s spam folder;
• Information on what to expect from you.  For example, how regularly will you be emailing your customer? What will you send them?
• Details on the benefits of being a subscriber, such as future discounts or priority access to content.  

A welcome email can be the perfect ‘first date’ between you and a potential customer - but don’t stop there!

2. A couple of ‘getting to know you’ emails, plus something valuable

Imagine if you proposed marriage on a first date.  How likely would the other person be to accept?

Just like with any dating process, you need to build a relationship with your customer before you send them an email about why they should buy your product/service (A.K.A the sales ‘marriage proposal!’).  The best way to do this is to further indoctrinate them into your brand, and provide them with something valuable.  But what does that mean?

Brand Indoctrination 101

Regardless of your product/service, customers want to deal with people - not brands.  So to get your customers to believe in you a little more, after your initial welcome email, send them a more personal email (potentially with a photo of you or your team) detailing why you started the business and how it’s changing people’s lives.  

‘Something valuable’

As a thank you to your subscribers for joining your list, you should also provide them with something ‘valuable’ in the form of content, or even a free sample or a trial.

By providing your customers with something valuable, you’re signalling to them that you’re invested in them, even if they haven’t purchased from you yet.  As a result, they’ll be more likely to read your emails in the future, engage with your brand, and eventually buy from you.

3. Offers that will enable you to segment them

You’ve welcomed your customers to your brand, and got them excited about it, so is your job done?

Not yet!

Email marketing is one of the best ways to gauge what products/services your customers want, and then to further target your marketing.  To do this, you need to:

• Email your subscribers a variety of offers, and then track who clicks through to download what.  For example, if you’re a shoe store and a customer just downloaded a ‘Guide to this Season’s Best Ankle Boots’ you can be pretty sure they’re interested in boots!
• After you’ve tracked your click-throughs, ‘segment’ your customers into certain categories.  For example, now you know you’ve got a customer interested in boots, they’ll be more likely to respond to a ‘10% off all boots’ sale, so make sure they’re first in line for those discounts!

Effective email marketing can take a bit of time, thought and strategy, but once you’ve got everything set up, you can much easily transform your subscribers into customers!

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