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Are You Throwing Away Sales – Guide to Email Marketing

Is your business throwing away sales? Maybe. I’m Syama Meagher, CEO of Scaling Retail, and I’m going to share with you a couple things you need to be looking out for when it comes to newsletter marketing. You know, newsletters and email are really golden. This is your opportunity to market to someone who’s saying, “Yes, I want to hear from you. Tell me everything about your business.” So as a brand owner, you need to be thinking about, “What do I do, the first person that I get on my mailing list, who isn’t a friend or a family member?” You know, it’s always great to share our news about our launches and our businesses with our friends and family, but we know they love us no matter what. Our goal is to start newsletter marketing as soon as we get that one person on your list.

Now you’re wondering, “Oh my gosh, I have someone on my mailing list. What do I do?” Well, the first thing you have to do is to make sure that you are plugged into a great autoresponder service. I like to use MailChimp, there are so many others that you can take a look at. And really, the primary objective of using an autoresponder series is that it allows you to start to send mass communication to all of the people on your newsletter. Now what you might not know is that within those autoresponder series, you can actually tailor different types of workflows in order to really get in front of the right customer and start to segment.

So that sounded like a lot of jargon. What does that mean? Basically, imagine this scenario, someone signs up to your website and they actually buy something. Now, you probably want to put that into a different newsletter than someone who doesn’t buy anything. And why is that? Well chances are that someone who has purchased something from you once, is going to be a great repeat customer and might buy from you from a second time. So you want to start marketing to them in a different way. Then the other people you have on your list, the ones who have just signed up or are maybe just trying to get to know your brand, you might want to put them through a different kind of welcome series. That welcome series could be a set of five different emails that go out over the next five weeks where you’re explaining to them a little bit about behind the scenes about your brand, you’re showing them about why they should care about your business, and you’re helping them to get a better understanding of who you are and what your brand stands for.

So that’s just one simple way of starting to look at the automated series. Now within the newsletter content itself, you want to make sure you have some great cadences. Cadence means you’ve set forth a schedule that you are going to follow. Now personally, if you’re on the Scaling Retail newsletter, which I hope you are, you get emails from me once a week on a Monday. That means that every Monday you know you’re going to hear something from me. That sets up a relationship, you can count on me, you know what kind of content I’m going to give you. So you need to start thinking as a marketer in that same way for your fashion business.

Now, even if you’re sending out an email once a month, if you’re sending out an email twice a month, whenever you’re sending out an email, you want to make sure that it’s formatted with content that is consistent. So that of course means you’re going to have product images, you always want to drive people through links back to your site, but you also want to think about adding extra content. You know your consumer is getting so many emails on a daily basis. I mean, luckily I have, like, three different email accounts, so I can kind of filter through all of the spammy stuff, but I have to tell you, the emails that don’t have more content than just product images are not emails that actually get me to click over.

So I would actually suggest thinking about writing your newsletters in three parts. The first is going to be maybe a little note, a little behind the scenes, what’s happening in your business, kind of an update. The second could maybe be a favorite item of the month, maybe it’s a bestseller, some product or news update. And then lastly, you want to advertise anything that’s going on in the store, whether that’s free shipping, whether that’s going to be a new coupon code, anything else, but make sure that your newsletter isn’t just going to be one picture, one item, right? People want to get to know you.

Now lastly, when it comes to newsletter marketing, it’s important for people to get to open up your emails, right? How do you get someone to say “Yes”? Well you’ve got to have great attention getting headlines. So I suggest sitting down and brainstorming, “What are all the great headlines that are going to match up with my merchandising schedule, that’s going to match up with the content that I’m creating?” And start to get crafty and really pay some attention to those subjects because having a great newsletter marketing system is not just about the great content, it’s about getting someone to actually absorb and read the content. They click over, they make a purchase, you put them in the other funnel, and all of a sudden you have yourself a newsletter marketing business just direct to your consumer from your e-commerce.

Alright guys, I hope you enjoyed that. Please feel free to leave a comment below on how you use email marketing to grow your business. As always, follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. I am where you are so come and find me. All right, thanks so much, bye.