What is Mailchimp & how can you use it to boost your small business marketing?

Trying to think of ways to expand your online presence and build customer relationships for your small business? Mailchimp might just be what you need, and at a total cost of £0.00 (for the basic version) it's a great tool to have in your digital toolkit.

 

What is Mailchimp?

 

Put simply, Mailchimp is an online email marketing tool that quickly and easily allows you to send emails to your customer base - for free!

 

What can I do with Mailchimp?

 

• Create sign-up forms on your website so your customers and website visitors can register their email to receive email updates from you.
  
  
• Send customised emails such as promotions, updates and more to your list of clients and those who've signed up.
  
  
• Schedule emails in advance to save time, and so that you don't have to be at the computer to ensure a particular email sends at a certain time.

 

What are the benefits of email marketing?

 

• Email marketing allows you to stay in the forefront of your customers' minds, by sending them an email every few weeks or every month or so to remind them of your services.
  
  
• It's likely to get your customers talking, referring you to their friends and forwarding on your emails to others.
  
  
• Effectively communicate your promotions and updates.
  
  
• By providing your customers with useful and interesting content, it'll also allow you to build on your brand image and how your customers perceive you.

 

Getting started with Mailchimp

 

There really are tonnes of interesting things you can do with Mailchimp, but first you'll need to register an account before you do anything, so sign up for one here if you haven't already.

Our expert web team will then be able to pop a sign-up form on your website so your website visitors can start registering to get emails with you. Once you've started to build your email list, now's the time to start planning some engaging emails to send to your customers.

 

What makes a great email? 

 

You'll want to start your email marketing off on the right foot, so there are a few key things to remember when composing an email to send to your customers to make sure you get the best results.

 

How often should you send emails? 

 

Think about how often you personally like or dislike receiving promotional emails. For me and for most others, too many is just plain annoying and I'm likely to unsubscribe from that company's emails, but too little and their marketing is unlikely to leave any kind of lasting impact on me.

Generally speaking, once every two weeks to once per month is a good frequency to go by, but there is an exception to the rule. For example, often I will receive updates from my local gym telling me there is no hot water or something is out of order, and these kinds of general updates are ok to send as and when they are necessary.

 

Use an interesting or personalised subject line

 

Getting your readers to actually OPEN your email can often be the hardest part! Luckily, there are lots of different ways to intrigue your readers enough to read your content, and once they've read a few that they like the chances are high that they'll keep reading.

 

• Personalise your email subject line. For example 'Hey Bill, have you seen this week's offer?'. Mailchimp allows you to use the first name of each of your contacts in your subject line, click here to find out exactly how to do this.
  
  
• Use humour or intrigue, e.g. 'Brand new weekly offers inside!'. This subject line doesn't tell the customer exactly what's in the email, but they at least know there'll be discounts, hopefully they'll read this to see which discounts they might be interested in.
  
  
• List-based subject lines that add value to the user, e.g. '7 exercises you can do at your desk for better posture'. This list format makes for easily digestible chunks of information. Plus, using numbers have also been proven to attract more of our attention than using words alone.

 

Keep it short, concise and relaxed

 

Nobody likes unnecessarily long, rambling emails just as much as nobody likes awkward jargon, so make sure you keep your email copy to-the-point. Before you send or schedule your email think to yourself 'does this information add anything of value to the reader?'.

 

Keep your content relevant to your audience

 

This should really go without saying, but it's surprising how often you get emails that simply aren't of interest to you! Large corporations often get this wrong, since they have so many different audiences to talk to, but as a small business with a single audience you should find this super easy.

To make sure your audience don't get bored of receiving irrelevant content and unsubscribe from you (yikes!), always ask yourself 'will this content help out my customers?', 'do my customers need/want to know this?' and 'have I sent anything similar to this before?'.

 

Let Smart Little Web manage your content to maximise results

 

If you haven't got time to manage your email marketing or you just want to maximise your results, let our team do the hard work for you. We have a range of SEO, content and email marketing help available on our website plans, click here to see which one might be right for you.