Email marketing is a simple and affordable way for your startup to communicate with potential customers and showcase your product or service. In addition to being direct and efficient, email is also a super flexible channel that allows your business to try out different ideas for your marketing campaigns.
Here are some tips and ideas you should consider when building an email marketing campaign for your startup…
1. Build a Strong Mailing List for Your Startup
From a marketing standpoint, building your mailing list should be one of your key priorities during the early stages. For a startup, it is vital to secure a list of valuable contacts who will have a genuine interest in your business.
The main thing to remember when building a list is quality over quantity. Try and identify contacts who will be interested in learning more about your startup and are more likely to engage with your emails.
Include a sign up box on your website! Someone that has consciously made the effort to subscribe is a high-potential lead. Beauty box startup Birchbox use this technique on their website to help grow their mailing list. The 15% discount acts as an added incentive.
2. Produce Good Email Copy
As a startup business, it is important that your emails are able to make a good impression on customers who don’t yet know your brand. This means you have to pay extra attention to spelling and grammar, as well as the tone of your email messages.
Smaller businesses should adopt a more friendly and inviting tone, in order to help establish a connection with new customers. Let the personality of your startup shine through in your emails to give readers a sense of who you are.
Good copy is also vital in your email subject line. Avoid spammy subject lines, as these could result in your email being ignored, or sent to the spam folder. Words like “free”, “win”, “cash”, or use of all caps and excessive punctuation are all no-go’s. This guide should help you prevent your email from being marked as spam.
3. Carry Out A/B Testing
For a brand new startup, it can be hard to find a marketing style that works. Email is great, as you have the opportunity to test out different ideas until you’ve found your perfect formula. This is where A/B testing can come in super handy.
Whether it’s a subtle change like logo size or background color, or a more drastic change such as subject line or intro text, testing both variants with your mailing list is a great way to see what works and what doesn’t. In Mail Designer 365, you can duplicate your master template and make as many different versions as you like to trial on customers.
Tip: Make sure you track the results to identify which email design performed the best. Find out more about this later on in this post…
4. Include a Clear Call-To-Action
One common error made by businesses big and small is to create a stunning email design but forget to make the CTA (call-to-action) clear to readers. Without a clear CTA, your email will not reach its full potential, as readers will not be able to move on the the next step.
You can use a CTA button to encourage customers to: visit your website, download your software, subscribe to your social media page, read a blog post, and much more…
There are many ways to create stand-out CTA buttons, as demonstrated in this guide. The main tips to keep in mind are:
- Keep text short and concise
- Use a colour which stands out in your design
- Make sure the font is bold and legible
- Test all links are correct before sending.
The below email by Lyft (source: reallygoodemails) is a great example of an effective CTA button. The white button contrasts well with the blue background and the text is clear and concise.
This is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Accordingly, it is difficult to figure out when to end it. But then, this is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Period.
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