Yes, there is such a thing as free marketing

One of the most important tasks for a small business is to maintain contact with its customers. Developing a newsletter program with a solid audience will prove to be a very important marketing asset for you.

Think about how on any given website you only have a few seconds to capture the attention of a visitor before they are gone forever. Developing a strategy to attract new customers and retaining existing clients is crucial to successful marketing. Maintaining a company blog is a great way to get your personal message out to many viewers. But a blog is a passive effort, meaning a user must navigate to it in order to get the message. Transforming a passive blog into a pro-active newsletter program is a logical step.

Researchers have shown that users have mentioned three reasons why they prefer to receive email newsletters:

1. Email newsletters  keep users up-to-date with informative content.

2. The convenience of Email newsletters delivered straight to the user’s inbox is attractive; users only need a  simple click to access the information that is of interest to them.

3. Email newsletters have timely content and real-time delivery.

Newsletter programs that take advantage of these benefits have a sustainable future. However they must constantly deliver specific and current information that helps readers with life or work issues.

A well thought out and regularly published newsletter will give your company the unique experience of getting to know your customers and, more importantly, give them a chance to get to know your organization. After several issues of your newsletter you can begin to learn what is of interest to your audience. It is easy to monitor which articles are being read by keeping tabs on which links are clicked. In future issues, be sure to include topics that are heavily read.

So how do we start building an email campaign for free?

The first thing you need to do is to start building an email list. To start with use a program such as Microsoft Excel to keep a track of you email list. Start by going through all your existing customers and adding their emails to your spreadsheet. Secondly go through all your emails that you have ever received to find additional email addresses. These could be potential customers as they have emailed you for one reason or another in the past. Thirdly make sure you collect business cards where ever you go. Every Time you obtain a business card get into the habit of adding it to your spreadsheet. You will soon find that your email list will start to grow rapidly.

Once you have an email list it is time to decide how you are going to market your email. Are you going to send out offers (an in your face approach) or are you going to send out an informative email on a topic which may end with an offer you have relating to that topic (a bit like this newsletter)?

At wey2creative we tend to use the latter. Once you have decided your approach write an article on your blog about your topic or if you do not have a blog create a page on your website and add the article to that page. In this case free email marketing, a few hundred words should suffice. Why are we writing the article on our blog? Simply because we do not want to put the whole article in our newsletter. Your newsletter should be an enticer for the reader to click to your site to read the whole article. When they are on your site, who knows what else they may look at!!

REMEMBER

Your email newsletter is such a huge representation of your company, which is why design truly matters.  We have spoken with many people that have told us they just don’t have the time it takes to put out a newsletter that looks professional enough to put their logo on.

Once we have our article written we need to get it out to our email list. So what are our options, remember we are going to do this for free.

Option 1

Use your default email program and send from that. A lot of people use this method, but it may not be beneficial to you. There may be sending limits on your account but most importantly you cannot track what your email list is doing with your newsletter. Are they reading it or are they simply deleting it? How many are clicking through to your site? This is where a more professional solution comes in and it is still free!!

Option 2

Mailchimp

Ever heard of  Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is an online email marketing program and whats more it is free to sign up. With the free account you can have up to 1,000 email addresses in your list and you can send out an email to all 1,000 subscribers 6 times a month. This is more than enough for small businesses.

Mailchimp also provides some basic email templates that you can use for you newsletter. More importantly Mailchimp will track all the emails that are sent out so you can see which campaigns are more effective.

Other great features of mailchimp are that if you have a WordPress website, they have a plugin that you can download and put on your site for newsletter registration. When someone registers for the newsletter on your site their email address will automatically be added to your Mailchimp account.

If your website has an RSS feed you can create a newsletter based on that, so your latest blog posts will be added to your newsletter automatically, this will save you time.

Mailchimp is, in our opinion, an essential tool for your business.

We hope you found this article interesting.