As a small business owner or a blogger, you know the importance of keeping your name in front of your customers. If you are like me, you use social media, blog posts and advertising to reach your customers. Recently I started using e-mail marketing and I have seen some great results myself and for my clients. Here are my four easy tips to getting started with E-mail Marketing using Constant Contact. Please note this post contains affiliate links.
Gather Your E-mail Addresses
I have a lot of comments on my hundreds of blog posts, and they all have e-mail addresses from each person who comments. I enter the addresses into Excel and use them to create my distribution list in Constant Contact. You can also collect addresses from current customers, business cards you have collected or through forms on your website. I also recommend importing your contacts from LinkedIn into Excel and then importing those into Constant Contact. Be sure to update your mailing list each time that you send a newsletter.
Develop Your Content
One of my clients, This Girl Beauty Spa has monthly specials. She wanted to develop a monthly newsletter highlighting these specials. Using Constant Contact, we developed a newsletter quickly and easily and sent it out to her clients. Likewise, I distribute a monthly newsletter highlighting my clients. specials and affiliate links.
Send Right Away or Schedule
You can send your newsletter right away or you can schedule it to go out later. This option allows you to develop content in batches and schedule it as appropriate. For example, my client wanted to send a newsletter about Small Business Saturday. We wrote it in October but scheduled it for distribution later in November.
Promote Newsletters on Social Media
Constant Contact gives you the ability to link your newsletter to Facebook as I did with my client, Lori. We did a $10 off coupon e-mail, shared it with her contact list and then also shared it on Facebook. This is a nice feature to extend the reach of your offer to those who follow you on social media but for whom you do not have an e-mail address. You can also copy your link and share it on other social media platforms. I link all of my newsletters from my homepage.
I hope you find this information useful. I welcome you comments. And if you need help with e-mail marketing, contact me!
