Email Marketing - The Power Is In Your Email List

The power is in your email list - but what are you sending it?

Here's how I helped a client with their email marketing. [a lot of it's techie talk, skip to the end if you prefer??]

The client had a newsletter designed by a graphic designer. It was quite extensive. It had a few key full-width images and text in between lots of smaller, 2-column snippets of news. Each snippet had a picture and a paragraph of text, with a link to an article on their website.

The only way I could see of replicating the exact design (which was created in Photoshop), was to build the newsletter in HTML.

I'm one of those web designers who learned HTML way back in the day when the Internet was new and that was the only way to make websites, and still comes in handy!

So I created the design using Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is great for this kind of thing but there was also a fair amount of hand-coding to get it right. I used some shortcuts by styling the headings and links in the header.

I would then upload the HTML file to Mailchimp and create the campaign. Before uploading the HTML file I uploaded all the images and then replaced the image URLs in the HTML file with the image URLs on Mailchimp - tedious I know but it was workable!

The newsletter went out every 3 months or so and this went on for a couple of years. I would use the previous month's newsletter as the template and just change the content.

I think the client was looking at cutting costs because at some point they wanted to know if they could do it themselves. I had a look at Mailchimp's drag-and-drop builder and I let them know it could be done but it wouldn't be an exact copy of the original design. They were OK with that and so I created a template for them to use.

There was some back and forth with questions on how to update it but it didn't take too long for them to take it over.

Client = happy to be saving money

Me = out of a job, lol

Why send newsletters?

Sending regular emails to your customer base is very important. They already know something about you whether they bought a product/service or signed up for your newsletter, and therefore there is some form of trust, and they are more likely to buy from you/use your service.

Depending on your industry and customer base a monthly newsletter is good but even a quarterly newsletter is better than nothing at all. You could also send short updates in between the newsletters with latest news like new releases, upcoming events, discount offers etc. It doesn't have to be sales, sales, sales all the time but it should be useful information too.

So - build your email list! Minimally it would be a list of people you have delivered services/sold items to. In addition to that you can offer incentives to people for signing up for your newsletter.

If you have any questions about email marketing - what to send, what platform to use etc. - I'd be happy to help.