251.405.2543
Sign up for our FREE webinar on February 25th at 2 p.m. CST to listen to us discuss our best campaigns to generate leads and new emails. You can ask questions and listen along. This is a useful webinar both both business owners and marketers. Sign up for the webinar.
If you’re a business, big or small, you need to have a running list of email contacts for marketing purposes. This means collecting your current customers’ emails along with potential customers’ email addresses. Having a running list of emails from your customers and prospects provides valuable ways to marketing your target audience and keep them informed.
Whether you are sending an email blast out about the latest updates and news within your company, promoting a new service or product, or notifying customers about an issue or update that could affect their business, it’s important to communicate with your target public via email.
But for many businesses, particularly small businesses, it’s tough to collect emails, especially if you don’t have a strong email marketing game plan. Even if you do, your current email list will shrink by the end of 2016, specifically by about 22.5%. Email addresses change, get deleted, people leave companies for new ones, and people opt-out of your email marketing. It’s just a fact of email marketing, but you need to have a strategy to tackle that shrinking list.
We use a strong email marketing strategy at BIS Designs, Inc. It’s essential to keep our customers informed and to reach out to prospects and qualified leads. Obviously, we keep an active list of all our current customers and that list is not hard to retrieve, but for generating new emails we use a couple different methods. We also have great advice for B2C businesses, as B2B and B2C marketing can differ.
1) Run online contests and giveaways
This is one of the easiest ways to gain emails. If your business is active on social media (which it should be), run a contest or giveaway that people will want to enter and have participants sign up using their email address. Make sure you specify in the contest or giveaway rules that they are agreeing to be opted-in to your company’s email marketing campaigns.
If you’re going to promote on social media, make sure you always create a landing page or form on your website as well. This will direct traffic to your site and make it easy to submit their information.
2) Create valuable, meaningful content
The saying, “Content is king” really rings true here. People sign up or get added to email lists and then get spammed with irrelevant or badly-written content. Provide value to the reader. This in turn can encourage them to share the email with their friends or colleagues- make sure you have social shares buttons and “email to a friend” buttons on all your emails to make it easy for them to share.
3) Make sure you create specific email lists for your groups
Not everyone in your email list will want to receive an email about a specific product or service. Make sure you send specific emails to specific groups who will be most interested in what you have to say— or else you will have opt-outs and unsubscribes.
4) Have a sign-up form on your website
This is a big one. It goes hand-in-hand with # 1. If you don’t have a way to sign up for emails on your website, then you are missing a huge avenue to gain emails. Very likely, your website visitors are interested in your business and products— that’s why they are visiting your website. Those people are qualified leads that you could market to, and they will more than likely want to sign up for emails from your business. Take a look at our sign-up incentive on our home page.
5) Consider creating a Sign-Up Popup on your website
You’ve seen them before: They are a popup that takes up a good bit of space and asks the website visitor to sign up for more information on a topic. You can easily exit out and continue on the website, so it’s not forcing anyone to sign up, but it’s giving them an easy avenue to enter their information by taking the option to sign up to them and not the other way around.
Mail Chimp offers this service.
6) Host an Event
This goes beyond just email marketing, as hosting an event is another marketing tactic that can do wonders for your company. Whether it’s a luncheon, seminar, webinar or phone conference Q & A, and all these events need email addresses to register. Plus, it puts your company in a thought-leader position in your community. Check out BIS Designs’ events for guidance (We have a webinar on this topic on Feb. 25th!).
7) Cold-Calling
Sure, it’s not the most exciting or fun task, but cold calling on a list of qualified leads is a way to introduce yourself over the phone and ask to send them more information via email. One of the best resources to create a call-down list of your local Chamber of Commerce directory for small businesses.
8) Promote your sign-up forms on social media
Make sure you have a clear way for your social media followers to sign up to your email list. On Facebook, tabs (we like Woobox) or the Call to Action button is a great way to take visitors to the sign-up landing page on your website. Make sure you consistently promote sign-ups in your social media posts with a link to the form.
9) Use social media advertising to promote your company and encourage sign ups.
Make sure the link in your advertisement takes the visitor to a sign-up form with the incentive. Either to “learn more,” “download a free ebook or white paper,” or “to get a free coupon or discount.” Give them a reason to sign up.
10) Partner with another company
Co-host a webinar or event or offer that will generate sign ups through your partner’s audience along with yours. Share leads with each other.
If you’re marketing your business digitally, which you should be in this day and age, you probably have a nicely designed website, maybe some SEO integrated into your site and a company Facebook page. It doesn’t take a huge budget or hours of labor to get your business seen online. Actually, some digital marketing tactics are pretty downright inexpensive.
Compared to traditional advertising via print or TV and radio spots, digital marketing puts less strain on your wallet and can be seen by thousands of people daily. But it really depends on how far you want to go to market your company online. Don’t be surprised if a “barely there” presence is not generating the amount of traffic to your website as you hoped.
But many small business owners ask, “What do I do to help grow my business online?” Well, there are many avenues to go down when it comes to digital marketing, some complex and some simple, but there is one specific tactic we want to highlight: Facebook advertising.
We are firm believers in using social media to help grow a business. Social media creates exposure, two-way communication with your audience and helps expand your business. There are organic ways to do that such as creating valuable content, establishing dialogues with your page fans, posting consistently and sharing interesting, cool articles and knowledge. But there are also paid tactics to grow your business on social media.
Facebook advertising is one of those tactics.
Facebook offers businesses a way to promote, grow and drive website traffic through “sponsored” posts. These advertisements show up on your target audience’s newsfeed and have a strong call to action that prompts viewers to:
The list extends further than just those four CTA's too. It really depends on what you want your Facebook advertising to do.
The best part about Facebook advertising is that you can place your ad in front of the people who truly matter to your business.
You can select very specific demographics that you want to target and Facebook does the rest. For example, say you were a local clothing boutique who catered to women aged 16 – 32 that lived in Baldwin County and are interested in shopping and fashion. You can enter that information and Facebook will find users that match those specifications and put your message in their newsfeed.
But how does this directly translate into new sales?
Well, if you don’t yet see the value, let me simplify:
Facebook ads put your business front and center of the people who matter on a channel they use daily. This exposes your business to people who have not yet heard of your company, but who will be interested in your product, then prompts them to visit your website to take a look at your services/products, and ultimately can lead to those visitors calling about how your business can help them. Ta-da!
Best part of all, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, this is a digital marketing tactic that is very inexpensive. You can create an ad for as little as $10 or as much as $300. It’s all based on your budget. Talk about a deal! Facebook is not the only social media channel offering advertising either.LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram are other channels that let your business shine.
So, think you want to jump on the Facebook advertising bandwagon, or are you still hesitant? No worries, that is why BIS Designs is here to help. Get in the know all about digital marketing with our free luncheon coming up on January 28 at the Original Oyster House in Gulf Shores, Alabama. RSVP today and enjoy a complimentary lunch and listen to our experts present on “How to Develop & Implement a Successful Digital Marketing Plan to Increase Company Revenue.” We want to help business owners grow their business and market the right way! Walk away with a powerful toolkit to make 2016 the best year yet for your business. Sign up here: http://askbisdesigns.com/seminar
Whitney Jones
Digital Marketing Specialist