For small businesses looking to improve their digital marketing strategies this year, email campaigns should be a priority (read why). Put simply, by dropping great content into your audience’s inbox on a regular basis you keep your business at the forefront of their mind. When it comes to the time where they need to buy from your industry, your business will be the first they think of!
By nudging people with reminders from your business every now and then can also be the difference between someone making the decision to buy from you or not. If someone has bought from you before, then regular emails that remind them why they bought from you in the first place mean there’s a great chance of securing repeat sales.
But it’s all very well us saying how great email marketing is, but you need great content for great email campaigns.
Email marketing goes hand in hand with inbound and content marketing (read about the relationship between inbound and content marketing). With email you can directly provide an audience with the sort of valuable content that builds the trusting relationship inbound marketing is all about.
You want to be including content that educates, informs, connects with, and intrigues your customer base. You’re reaching out to them, so you better have something worthwhile to say. We’ll give you some great ideas to include in email marketing campaigns that will ensure a great return on your investment.
Now, emailing people about a new product or service you’re offering might sound like a bit of shameless self-promotion - not very inbound marketing! But there is no reason why it can’t be value-adding.
It’s likely that a large portion of your mailing list will be made up of people who have bought from you in the past. So, if they’ve bought from you before, it’s presumably valuable for a lot of them to understand changes to what your business offers!
You don’t have to frame it like a sales pitch, either. A showcase, a tutorial, or showing the product or service in action could all be great options.
What’s a better way of telling people your business is trustworthy and provides excellent service than it coming from yourself? Let customers share their story with your business!
Reviews and testimonials from happy clients will be really well received by others, and encourage them to buy themselves.
Check out our article on customer journey videos to find out more.
Content that answers the questions your customers have on their minds earns their trust. It’s as simple as that. That’s why your content should focus on answering questions!
By including videos, images, and links to useful resources that answer the questions you get asked most by customers you’re immediately providing valuable content. You also have a potentially inexhaustible list of questions to get through, providing a mountain of ideas for content to include in your email campaigns - so there’s no excuse for running out of content!
If you’ve worked on a cool project recently, or have a great example of your work to show off, then sending out an in-depth case study can be brilliant piece of content for building trust with clients. Not only does this show the great work your business does, it also educates people about how you do what you do and can provide an insight into your industry.
The benefits of this are clear; it presents you as an expert within your niche, shows you are transparent and honest, and you’re keen to provide people with interesting information.
What better way of building a relationship between your business and customers than by introducing them to your team via email? You can include videos, written pieces, images – loads of content to make people feel they know your business that bit better.
You don’t have to limit the information to purely work, either. Make it personal and relatable and people will feel that human connection with your business that generates the relationship inbound marketing is designed to create.
If you have articles on your website that are themselves providing great, value-adding content, then these can be easily repurposed into email form. Simply shortening and refining the text so it’s more digestible via email and linking the audience to your website is all you need to do!
As well as providing great content, this also drives up your website traffic. Once people are on your website – even if they just went to read the article – who’s to say they won’t go on to other pages and get in touch? So something like an article that may not seem to have a direct link to sales can do just that.
Your emails should have a call to action without a doubt. Your providing people with great content, so there’s a good chance they’ll want to see more from your business.
Your call to action could be:
You’ve reeled people in with your value-adding content, now make the most of it!
So there are a some of the best pieces of inbound marketing content you can be including in your email campaigns. With this you’ll be adding value to your audience, building relationships with them through educational and relatable content, and boosting the chances of them buying from you in future.
