“What is email marketing?” Fair question. Unlike one-to-one messages, email marketing entails sending one message to many people—dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. It’s permission-based, which means your readers must opt in to your newsletter, and you need to explain to them why they’re receiving it.
If you’re like a lot of small businesses and organizations, you may be using a personal email account — like Gmail, Outlook, AOL, or Yahoo — to communicate with a group of email contacts. But if you are still using your personal email to send out mass emails on a regular basis, you NEED TO STOP!
Chances are you’ve also noticed some limitations in what you can and can’t do with a personal email account, and they’ve created Email Marketing for that specific reason.
Even though it may seem easy and harmless to copy all of your contacts in one simple email and hit send, you are creating far more damage for yourself.
Why You Should Stop Using Your Personal Email for Marketing
- You can’t create professional-looking emails that match your brand
- Your email will get blacklisted, meaning it will be marked as spam. You’ll quickly start to realize that the emails you are sending, even daily responses, aren’t getting to your intended receivers. And it’s a tedious process to get your email off the blacklist.
- If your email is directly related to your website’s URL (yourname@yourwebsite.com) your website can also be blocked. When the end users try to click on your website via the email that has now been marked spam, it will want to block your website as well.
- Since you are not providing the courteous service of allowing users to “unsubscribe” to your email blasts they will only have the option to “block” you from their inbox in order to avoid unwanted emails. Unfortunately this will block all emails coming from you, even the important ones.
- You can’t deliver these emails in the right format for each individual internet provider. Each email is processed differently depending on the email client and you can’t provide appropriate branding for your business with these unknowns via your personal email account.
- You have no understanding of who opened an email or clicked a link. You hope your emails are getting opened and read, but personal accounts don’t provide that information.
- It can be very difficult to keep track of your email contacts. Manually keeping track of new email addresses and people who have asked to be taken off your list can cause headaches and take up hours of your time.
Email Marketing Campaigns
Email is the primary form of daily communication in the business world and it’s important to understand the capabilities, purposes, and limitations of the email client you are operating with. If reaching out to sales prospects, gaining business, or maintaining existing relationships is a key feature to the success of your business then you should dive into the never-ending possibilities and benefits from Email Marketing.
So, why haven’t you taken the leap to create an email marketing campaign? Maybe because you believe it’s expensive, time consuming, difficult, or all of the above? We can tell you without a doubt that it is actually none of the above.
Using a service designed for mass emailing can make your life much easier. You will find that utilizing a tool like Mailchimp can not only be fun, but it can open so many more doors for your business. Over the years, we’ve recognized that creating a Mailchimp account for our clients is extremely cost effective and provides detailed statistics to help grow your business and explore other online marketing efforts.
This tool provides you with reports to monitor who’s opening your emails, what they are clicking on within those emails, if they are sharing it, immediately deleting it, or saving it to reference again. You can determine what email addresses are worth keeping based on activity alone, gather data on popular topics you’ve sent and gain feedback on different approaches you can take for future campaigns.
Mailchimp also enables you to monitor new subscribers and unsubscribers. A platform like this can easily integrate with your social media marketing and website allowing you to gain subscribers through all points of your online presence.
With 91% of U.S. adults preferring to receive promotional emails from the companies they do business with (MarketingSherpa, 2015) and the same percentage of marketers stating that email is the most effective channel to move the sales needle, (The Relevancy Group, 2015) it’s clear that email marketing is the right step to take when moving forward on your marketing efforts.
Contact us if you’d like to start a Mailchimp account for your business. We take all the hassle out of it and provide you with multiple templates to use so that you can simply drag and drop your content and press send!