Email Marketing Tutorial for Small Business Owners

Transcript

Are there a lot of ups and downs in your business? Do you wish that you could bring in business on a more consistent basis?

Hi, I’m Carmen Sognonvi and I recently got an email from a viewer who’s struggling with that exact issue in her business. Keep watching to find out what advice I have for her.

By the way, if you want to get a list of the seven tools that I used to run all the marketing in my business, Urban Martial Arts, be sure to go to carmensognonvi.com/tools. I’ll show you everything for who we use for graphic design, and printing, And i’ll even share with you an app that allows you to track how your flyers are being distributed.

So today’s question comes from a viewer named Winnie, or at least that’s what we’ll call her, and she lives in Vancouver Canada. And Winnie writes:

I own a Nail Salon and we’ve been in business for about three years. Business can be slow sometimes, so I need to increase traffic into the salon on a consistent basis. In my industry it is very common to hand out stamp cards, but i’ve been trying to avoid this option because it focuses too much on the transaction, and doesn’t necessarily build brand loyalty. We do collect email addresses from our customers by offering them exclusive promotions. I send these out every 2 months or so. But I’d like to implement something more concrete and consistent. Do you have any ideas? Thanks, Winnie.

So Winnie, the fact that you are collecting email addresses puts you wayyyy ahead of most of your competitors. I can almost guarantee that most other nail salons in your neighborhood are not doing that. So, kudos, because that is laying the foundation, which is the first step. What I would recommend, and I think it’s great that you are already sending out promotions, I think the way to add to that, and really build the loyalty that you are talking about, is to implement a regular email newsletter. So in this video I am going to share with you three things about email newsletters. First, we’ll talk first about the format, then we’ll talk about the content, and then we’ll talk about the frequency, how often should you be mailing; and then finally, we wanna make sure that you stay till the very end of the video because I have a bonus tip for you, and without this bonus tip, or rather if you do this part wrong, noone is even going to read your emails. So it’s really, really, important that you get it right.

Number one: Format. I like to start off every email newsletter with a section called: “A Personal Note”. And this is a personal note from me and my husband in which we either give an update about the business, or an update that has something to do with something to do with our personal life. Now, obviously, this is a business, email newsletter, so you’re not going to get TOO too personal, you know somethings are TMI, but don’t be afraid to share some moments from your personal life, because after all we’re a local mom and pop shops, right? And so we have the advantage of not being a faceless entity. So you want to make the most of that, by not being afraid to share little moments from your life. So, often times for us, the personal note will be something that’s going on in the school,maybe a tournament that you know, we’ve won, sharing you know different results of different memories had, But then sometimes, it’ll be as simple as: “Hey, we took our girls to the park this weekend, and they had a great time playing in the grass. Check out this picture of our daughter.” And, those little emails, you’ll be surprised, sometimes you’ll get the most response to those. And people will come into the store and be like “oh my god, that picture of your baby was so cute! Blah blah blah. So it actually builds that personal bond.

Now this next segment, is actually going to be the primary contents, so I’m going to talk a little bit more about this in the next section. So I’m going to leave it at that for now. So after the main content, you want to have some promotional links. So one mistake that people make sometimes with email newsletters, is they’re afraid to sell at all. They kinda feel like: “No I want it to be it ALL content, all content, all advice, all of value. And thats fine, you should want to include a lot of content and value, but don’t be afraid to also use this opportunity to let people know what you’ve got going on. Because this can be a great place to let people know about a special that you’re running or in the case of our business we have a lot of people who are enrolled in one program but we have the ability to cross promote a different program to them. So, for example, they may be an adult enrolled in our fitness kickboxing program but they actually have kids too, So they may be interested in putting their kids in our karate program. So even though they’re already a customer I want to make sure that they are know about the programs that we’re running in our kids karate program just in case this is the time that they want to sign their kids up. So don’t be afraid to add a little bit of promotion in there, especially if you’ve got any specials going on.

Number two: Content.

You’ve probably heard about content marketing. It’s kind of a big thing nowadays in the marketing Circles but a lot of people think that content marketing is way to generate new leads or bring in new customers I think that when it comes to local bricks and mortar small businesses like ours the role of content marketing is not so much about bringing in new leads as much as it’s about enhancing the relationship with your current customers and your current leads.

So in our business for instance, we have people who are already enrolled in our programs and then we have a huge bunch of people on our list that are not enrolled yet, or maybe they used to be enrolled and are no longer, or they inquired but never quite signed up for anything. And so from our perspective we use content as a way to really enhance our relationship to build that brand loyalty to establish our expertise and to really build that trust with people. So that by the time that we do go to promote something to them, they already know that we’ve provided them with so much valuable content and so many valuable tips that they don’t feel bad because we’re– it’s not like every time that we email them we’re trying to sell sell sell sell sell. them something We’re having a good mix of content and value vs. sales and promotion.

So let’s talk about what goes in the actual content. Now one common misconception is that it has to be text-based, right? So people assume that you gotta be blogging, you gotta be publishing articles. Not necessarily the case. In a case like you, where you own a nail salon which is a very visual kind of business, why not use images and videos? Those are absolutely appropriate for the kind of work that you do. So, I think it would be much more interesting for me to see the top 5 manicure nail art designs you guys did over the last week, rather than me reading a boring article about well these are the different kinds of gel that you can use in a gel manicure. What are the pros and cons of each.

Sure, that’s really informative and useful if I’m a nail tech or if I’m really hardcore wanting to know the science of it, but I think that most customers just want to look at pretty stuff, right? I’m a big nail junkie myself and so I like to get ideas I like to see what other people are getting done on their nails so that I can maybe implement something with similar ideas. So it doesn’t have to be text-based. And don’t get too hung up on thinking that: “Oh,I have to have this huge content marketing department.” No! It can be as simple as one tip it doesn’t have to be a full-blown article, it doesn’t have to be a full-blown video It can just be some pictures or can just be a tip. You know, say that you own a carpet cleaning business and you just share one tip each week on how to keep your carpet clean or how to prevent odors from getting in. Just one simple tip, and that can be it.

Number three: Frequency

So this is the age-old question: How often should I email my list? I would say that most business owners are not mailing frequently enough, I think that many of us are scared of annoying our customers and so we hold back and we say: ehhhhhhh ya know I already emailed them once this month, I don’t want to overdo it. I think that that’s absolutely wrong and in fact, what you’ll find is sometimes that the least frequently that you email those on your list the more spam complaints you’re going to get. Why? Because it’s been so long since you’ve reached out to this list that they completely forgot that they even signed up in the first place and so they think that you’re spamming them because they think they never gave permission for you to send anything to them. the more often that you mail a list if you are spam complaints you’re actually going to get. It’s a weird thing.

So, I would recommend and one this may surprise some of you I would actually recommend doing a weekly email newsletter now weekly may seem like a lot to you, but think about your inbox. Think about the massive volume of emails that you get each day. Nowadays hearing from someone once a week is actually a pretty moderate pace. And one more thing I would say is don’t get too hung up on open rates. I think open rates are kind of, you know, one of the typical measures that people use when they look at how effective a marketing campaign is when it comes to email. But don’t get too hung up on those.

A. open rates are not always very accurate because of some technical stuff I’m not gonna get into right now, but also, B. Sometimes people don’t necessarily open your email but it doesn’t mean that they don’t care about hearing from you. Bear with me. I know that may not make much sense but, think about it there are probably a lot of newsletters that you subscribe to that you don’t always open and read every week. However you are happy that you’re still subscribed and when it comes in your inbox, you’re like: “Oh yeah! That guy, that girl, that company. I’m happy that I’m still subscribed I’m not going to read it and open it this week but I wanna keep hearing from them.” And sometimes even if people aren’t opening your emails just seeing that subject line come across their inbox every week is a form of brand marketing in and of itself. Even though they’re not opening the email, they see from the subject line, I’m going to get into that in a second, that you’re providing value, and again that’s building that relationship, even if they don’t open the email. So, I would definitely recommend emailing at least once a week.

Now one more tip, when it comes to content, is you don’t have to be creating anything brand new every single time that you send out an email newsletter, especially if you’ve been doing this on a regular basis. And let’s say that you’ve been doing this one or two years in a row, you can start recycling some tips from before. So let’s say that you publish an email newsletter regularly for 12 months now in month 13 you may start interspersing some of the tips that you shared in month one or two, because most likely will be brand new people on the list that I never seen those tips before, and even the people that have seen those tips before they may not remember it because that was more than a year ago. So don’t be afraid to mix in some archived content and it also takes a bit of the pressure off you because you don’t have to come up with a brand new stuff all the time.

Bonus tip. This is a really really important one. I will sign up sometimes for newsletters of local businesses and I find that they will put in the subject line: “email newsletter January 1st 2015”. Nobody wants to open up an email with the subject line is: email newsletter on a date. That’s not interesting so you have to understand that email subject line is really the advertisement that should convince that person why they should open up email and read it. So you want to make that as enticing as possible and what I like to do is always have a specific format. A simple thing you can do is always start each subject line with newsletter in square brackets and end up with the subject line. You might actually have a name for your newsletter, that’s something that you can do that’s something that we actually do. We have two versions of our email newsletter that goes out. One to students and one to non-students. And so the student version is called student newsletter but then the leads version I don’t want to call it leads newsletter that would be awkward right? But we actually name that one “black belt success” so in the subject line I put success in square brackets and then the subject line.

So now what should be in the subject line? So the subject line if you’re publishing an article, it could be the headline of the article or if you’re not publishing an article if you’re doing something like Winnie, you would be doing where you’re sharing photos of your best manicures that week make it something that is very descriptive and that’s really provokes curiosity so something like “you’ve never seen pink nails done like this” or there’s a reason Kim Kardashian loves this kind of manicure” something like that something that has a hook that makes you think “huh what is she talking about I want to open this up and see it. And you want make sure that then in the text preceding the photos you link it back up there and you make that link and explain what you’re talking about in the subject line. so the subject line is absolutely one of the most important things because if you don’t get the subject line right nobody will open your email and read it and it was all for naught ok so if you would like to see a sample actually of our letters that we send out at Urban martial arts just go to
carmensognonvi.com/sample and I will show you a sample one so you can see the exact.format that we use. You can see how we link to the different articles and you can see some of the promotional material that we list as well. So carmensognonvi.com/sample if you want to check out a sample email newsletter from us.

So if you found this video useful, I would encourage you to sign up to get email updates from me. Just go to carmensognonvi.com/newsletter and sign up there. And if you have a question that you’d like me to answer in a future video, just email it to me at info@camensognonvi.com. Thanks for watching.

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