Email is still as relevant and maybe more so than it ever has been. It is the most effective means of tending to your existing green industry customers with things like customer newsletters, and it’s the most direct way to reach your leads.
Here are a few tips to help the organization and optimization of your email marketing strategy.
1. Use Engaging Content
Don’t forget that an email is easy to delete. It’s necessary to have engaging content that isn’t all selling yourself. Use emails as a way to show potential customers that you can be a resource for them, and in turn they could become a promising lead.
Good content will create somewhat of a relationship with your audience in a way that selling yourself will not. One place that good content will come in handy is in your subject line. This is the first thing your audience will see and if you don’t make it good, your well-thought-out email could be trashed before it’s even glanced at.
2. Easy Opt-in form
In order for your audience to receive emails, they must opt-in or subscribe to them. This will usually be a result of good content from your business on other platforms like your website or blog, so that is where you should place opt-in forms.
Include your opt-in forms at the top of your website and blog’s home page to make it easy to see and easy to access. Requiring only an email and how often they would like to receive email notifications is the best way to get people to sign up, less is more.
If you use a separate sign-up page, limit the amount of competing messages like calls-to-action so distractions are limited.
3. Create a personal and brief welcome email
Once someone has signed up for your emails, they should receive a short welcome email to thank them for signing up. This email should be personal, short and visually pleasing. The welcome email will set the tone for all emails delivered from you from here on out.
If you can, use software that can personalize each message based on the information given at sign-up, like first or last name.
The welcome email is important because it’s no secret that there are an outrageous amount of promotional emails just waiting to be sent, they chose you! Thank them and welcome them in a gracious but brief way so they stick with you.
This is also the first chance you have to spark their engagement, so include things like CTA’s in your welcome email along with some incentive to open them.
[Related: 5 Inbound Marketing Tactics for your Green Industry Business]
4. Provide incentive
Embed promotional messages and offers in your emails. Offer them 10% off a service or something that will incentivize them to continuously receive emails. Make it known at sign up that they will receive these incentives for signing up. Your goal after all is to convert them to customers and get them using your service right away, so make it easy for them to do so. Offer your first promotion in the welcome email, to entice your subscriber’s right from the start.
It may be productive to put a time limit on the offer to help ensure a faster sell and to get them in the door that much faster.
Many retail sites offer a percentage off of products just for signing up. Follow their lead by offering subscribers a deal on a service just for opting-in to your email notifications.
5. Organize leads
Organizing leads becomes easier with the more information you have. The importance of organizing leads lies in your personalization and thus can directly affect your green industry business' sales. This organization process also lends itself to your market research in the long run. A company like Groupon does this by allowing their audience to easily give them information that helps group the subscribers into different lists. They are grouped into three main categories; location, types of deals preferred, and notifications. This is also where making it easy for subscribers to change their email frequency comes in handy.
For a full list of email tips, download our eBook (Email 101: How to Leverage Email to Grow your Green Industry Business for free!
