The Benefits of This Service
Having a trusted email marketing package is the key to building one of your business’s biggest assets – your prospect and customer email list. With this list, you can promote your business to all who have opted in to receive information from you. This can include new products or services, a service enhancement, special “insider” sales, new menu items or promotions, announcing new content on your Facebook page, holiday specials, birthday specials, and a whole host of other opportunities to promote your business to your prospects and customers. For the average small business, this feature can come with no monthly recurring fees, or if it does, a relatively small monthly fee.
Here are some of the benefits of email marketing:
- You can send customized, personalized messages and offers to different customers or prospects
- You can send timely offers as fast as you can create new content
- You can created an automated “welcome” email series to new prospects of customers to educate them on what your business does
- You can link directly to content on your website or social media accounts
- You can integrate your email marketing with your social media marketing platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and other platforms
- You can generate new customers simply by asking your email audience to forward or share the email using social media links.
- You can integrate your email platform with any ecommerce platform you have such as WooCommerce to sent out emails related to the status of customer orders. Note, if you do not set up your email provider the right way, ALL of your emails from WordPress will end up in your customer’s spam folder!
So, what is stopping most businesses from taking advantage of this inexpensive marketing channel? The main reason is lack of knowing how to get started! It’s not as simple as just signing up with a provider.
There are so many email platforms from which to choose, and most of these have a high learning curve. Honestly, most business people are too busy running their business to try to figure out how to get started. Typically, before you send out your first email, you need to do the following:
- Select a platform and a participation level
- Configure an SMTP server so that your emails don’t end up in your recipients spam folders (where they may never be seen)
- Integrate your API credentials with WordPress or other web hosting package you may be using
- Secure the identity of your email “from” address with your web host by setting up some confusing settings with your domain name provider
- Create custom fields to be used to capture subscriber data
- Create initial sign-up forms
- Integrate these sign-up forms on your own website
- Create an initial autoresponder workflow
- Learn how to create marketing messages
- Have a checklist of when to send out emails
- Understand the legal requirements of email marketing
- Understand the three key email marketing metrics
- How to send the right email message to the right audience segment
Whew! That’s a lot of work to do.
What We Will Do for You
Fortunately, at TOBS, we can help get you up and running by setting you ups with the same service that we use to send out emails. For most of you, there will be no monthly charge (unless you are sending out more than a 100 emails per day). Also, currently, most of the more advanced features (like workflow automation) are available with the free version of the account.
Under this service, we will do the following:
- Set up your email service account with our provider, including providing all information needed to open an account.
- Install an SMTP plugin for WordPress (if you have a WordPress site) and configure with your API credentials
- Log into your web host (domain name) provider to set up your SMTP server information and create the required authentication records that will prevent your email account from being spammed and ensure delivery to your recipients’ inboxes
- Create any custom fields you may need to use when capturing visitor information (we will help you figure this out)
- Create one initial sign up form so that you can start getting subscribers
- Show you how to get the sign up form code on your website
- Show you how to segment your audience into different groups
- Give you some ideas on what to offer your site viewers in exchange for them providing their email address
- Show you how to create marketing emails to send out to your list
- Show you how to create and enable automation workflows such as an initial drip marketing campaign
- Provide you with links to free training material that will teach you how to get the most out of your email marketing platform
- Provide you with a Best Practices guide to email marketing
Once you are up and running, your website will start collecting new subscribers on a daily basis. You will be able to encourage your subscribers to come back to your website to take advantage of special offers or to read new content. And better yet, you can spread out the investment cost of getting setup with service over 60 days! All while building credit in the name of your business.