You can use email marketing to build relationships with current and potential customers in Covington and the greater New Orleans area.

How can Covington businesses benefit from email marketing is a question that we get quite often at Twinning Pros. As a full-service Digital Marketing Agency, we specialize in every form of Digital Marketing. But Email Marketing is one of our favorites.  It’s an oldie but goodie, and email marketing is never going to go out of style. So if you are a business in Covington La, email marketing is the tool for you.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email Marketing is the use of email to develop authentic relationships with future clients/customers. Every single business can benefit from this type of marketing. Not only can you touch base with potential customers, but you can keep in touch with your current ones as well. Keeping communication with your clients/customers is the easiest way to keep your name in the back of your mind. That way when they need your services you will be the person they think of.

Why Choose Email Marketing?

Because email marketing isn’t sending spam, someone must opt-in to receive something from you. Making it the ideal way to stay in touch. They want to receive information from you, so sending them an email with the helpful information or deals they are looking for is the key to staying relevant to your potential client/customer.

What Ways Can You Use Email Marketing?

Email marketing can be used in a lot of ways. Some of those ways include the welcome email, newsletters, standard promotional campaign, seasonal email campaign, triggered email campaign, social media connection campaign, post-purchase drip campaign, abandoned cart campaign, and of course the re-engagement email campaign.

All of these are the perfect way to stay in touch with your email base. There is an option for every business whether you are an e-commerce, b2b, or even b2c business.

Types of Email Marketing Services:

When you sign up for an email marketing service you will find that they have different options for you to choose from: Campaigns, Auto Responders, and Workflows. Each one of these options has its own benefits to add to your business. It is up to you (or your email marketing specialist) to decide which one is going to work for you.

Campaign

An email campaign is an email that is usually created to be sent out once. It could be a monthly newsletter that you design to be sent out to your current customers and other members on your mailing list that talks about what is going on this month and things to look for in the future. This could also be a coupon around some sort of “event” you are having at your business. It is email marketing best practice to send out a monthly newsletter to keep in touch with your audience so your business comes top of mind the next time they come in need of any of your services.

 Auto Responders

Autoresponders, also known as a drip campaign, is a series of emails that are sent out when prompted by an action that someone took on your page. Maybe they downloaded an ebook or another free item that you have offered on your site/landing page. The autoresponder then sends them down a journey where you decide how many emails to send out, how many days apart, and the time you want them to be sent.

Workflows

Workflows are like autoresponders, but they take it a step further. It’s almost like a flow chart that has different options for each action the user takes. Workflows have two main components, the enrollment criteria, what qualifies this person for the workflow, and the goal, the ending action that would take the person out of the workflow.

The difference between the autoresponder and the workflow is that the workflow is smart. It can change the direction of the autoresponder based on what the person who is in your drip campaign finds useful. Making it exponentially better. Say a person signs up to receive a welcome email, and then the next email would be to send them your free ebook, the workflow would already know that they received that and would then adapt to send them a different email directed towards the goal of your workflow. Not regurgitating the same material and keeping every piece of information that they receive fresh and innovative, making sure they stay engaged. An auto-responder sends them one specific set of emails with no variations in between.  

How Can Email Marketing Benefit Your Business?

Email marketing is the best way to start building an authentic relationship with potential customers. 

Example: You are a boutique in Destin and you also have an e-commerce shop. You want people to know when you have a sale going on, so in the store (and of course online) you give your customers the option to opt-in to receive emails from you to find out when you have your next sale or promotion going on. Have an email campaign set up to let them know when the next sale hits, or maybe you want to offer them 20% off of their next purchase for signing up? An email campaign can be set up to send out to the customer once they have opted-in. Giving them the option to purchase something from your shop again both in-store and online!

Benefits of Email Marketing

Email marketing is the best way for local businesses to stay in touch with their customer base.  You don’t have the time to send out a personalized email touching base with every potential client or customer that comes your way, because you are busy running a business. Email Marketing Automation has never been easier. Setting up an automated campaign gives you the ability to send out those “personalized” emails at the click of a button. You use the personal information they give you, such as first name, business name, or nickname, – input the information into the campaign you set up with your automated email service provider, and then you are all set to go!

Email has been around since the beginning of the internet, and it isn’t going away anytime soon. The internet may be an ever-changing place, but email marketing software just gets smarter as the technology continues to expand. We encourage all businesses to have an email campaign set up – if not just for a post-purchase email saying hello and thank you to that new customer that you have acquired.

Email Service Providers

To set up an email campaign you are going to need to sign up with an email service provider. Some of the best ones to use are listed as follows:

Mailchimp – Free Plan, sends (up to 12,000 emails) to 2,000 providers.

Active Campaign – Does not have a free plan, but has a 14-day free trial. 

Ontraport – Does not have a free plan but has a 14-day free trial.  

Constant Contact – no free plan but has a 60-day free trial.

GetResponse – no free plan but does have a free 30-day free trial.

Drip – they have a free plan, up to 100 subscribers with unlimited emails to send.

Most email marketing service providers offer similar plans – you just have to take your marketing budget, and your needs into account. Most of them offer free trials to get started, and even offer free options – you just don’t get to 100% personalize your emails (taking their name out of the email) by going with the free version. So if you’re OK with the footer of your email having their name listed then you should be good to go with a free version like Mailchimp offers.

We personally have used Mailchimp, we liked the free version but as we started to expand our version, we then moved on to ActiveCampaign. We liked that we can visually build out our workflows on the front end and can change it around to meet our needs. Mailchimp has the potential for automated workflows, it just is a little bit more time-consuming to build out.

Need Help With Email Marketing?

As you can see: No matter what type of business you have, email marketing is the marketing tool for you. If you aren’t using it yet, you should start using it immediately.

If email marketing sounds like a marketing tool that you would like to utilize for your business, but you don’t know where to start: Twinning Pros can help you get started with your email marketing.

Whether you want us to advise you on your email marketing campaigns, or to set it up and do it all for you we can do just that. Contact Twinning Pros today to see how we can help you maximize your reach with email marketing!

Email Marketing FAQ