Email Marketing for Startups

Emailing marketing is growing in popularity as more and more businesses realise the huge influence it can have over clients and customers, along with many other benefits. Email marketing is a relatively simple way to reach a large number of people at once and it should be utilised as best it can be by businesses of all sizes – ranging from small startups to large corporate companies.

When you receive an email from a company you have previously used advertising their newest service, this is email marketing. When you receive an email from a shop you often shop up advertising money off or updates about their latest stock additions, this is email marketing. Email marketing is everywhere and if done correctly it will drive traffic to your website and increase your sales.

Before starting an email marketing campaign, startups should take some time to establish what they want to achieve and who they are trying to appeal to – knowing your audience and having clear set goals helps to keep your campaign in the right direction – then it is time to research email marketing as a whole; the more you know about email marketing the more you are likely to get back in return.

Things to Consider

When diving in to email marketing, you should consider a few different things to ensure your startup achieves the best results possible. This includes:

• Decide what you want to achieve and follow through with it. Overly crowded emails often end up ignored or deleted and therefore if you are focusing on a specific product or service, make this clear; trying to advertise everything all at once is likely to result in confused customers who are not really sure what your startup does.
• Keep it branded. Like all forms of digital marketing it is important that your email is branded and in line with the colours and tones used throughout your website, social media and even graphics.
• Consider your audience. The type of email you send will be entirely dependent on your target audience; the type of language and images used for 18-24 years olds will be different to what is used for those aged 60+.

Benefit of Email Marketing for Startups

Compared to other more traditional methods of marketing, email marketing covers a number of bases when the benefits of email marketing for startups are considered.

• Simple – Gone are the days of one-by-one leaflet distribution; email marketing’s key benefit is that it can be sent to a large number of people in a simple way. All it requires is for a business to create the email marketing campaign and it can be sent to any number of people at the push of a button.
• Engaging – Email marketing can be interactive, brightly coloured and can include images and videos. These all work to engage the recipient and grab their attention and as with all marketing, the more engaged a customer is the more likely they are to remember what you are offering.
• Trackable – Email marketing is trackable. Whether you send an email marketing campaign out to 1,000 or 10,000 people, it is possible to track exactly who opened it, who clicked on the links and who didn’t ever receive it. This works well when analysing the success of a campaign and what changes would be made on the next email marketing campaign for an improved result.

Email Marketing for Startups: Tips

Below are some key tips for email marketing for startups; though successful email marketing is not always easy, these tips may go some way to helping you avoid some common mistakes.

• Have an interesting subject line – The subject line is the first thing a person will see when your email arrives in their inbox and therefore it needs to be interesting, teasing and must make them want to open the email. After all, an unopened email is useless.
• Avoid recipient’s Junk folders – No one looks in their junk folders and therefore it is vital that your email arrives in their inbox. Achieving this is all down to creating an email that is in no way deemed ‘spamworthy’ and avoids certain words, unnecessary images or links. Exact guides to the types of words to avoid and how many links are too many can be debated, but trial and error is needed.
• Choose your email marketing platform wisely – Not all email platforms will work well for you and choosing the best one will take some research. MailChimp, Elastic Mail and Eloqua are all popular options and offer different prices and services. Some even provide templates for you to build an emailer yourself.

Whatever type of startup your business is it could benefit from email marketing. Email marketing for startups is no different than email marketing used by established brands and if it is done well, great results can be achieved.