Building an audience online can be a daunting experience when you're a small business owner who has to do everything on your own, while trying to learn from the millions of tips and tricks of tools on the internet to increase sales and grow your brand.

Today we have compiled the steps that have helped our clients grow the list of subscribers via email in their stores and increase their sales in 6 months.

Tips to grow your email subscriber list

Email Marketing for Small Businesses

Email is a marketing channel for businesses, which serves to distribute relevant content to subscribers directly in their inbox, in order to collect responses, generate purchase actions or store visits. The higher the reading and response rate of an email, the more efficient it will be to communicate with your target audience, and to sell them your product faster.

Email marketing is a very effective way to reach millions of potential customers in a very short time; and allows you to establish a more intimate connection with your subscribers because you can share your business achievements, your challenges, announcements of special promotions, invite them to exclusive events and much more.

Tools and resources

Before starting any email marketing campaign, we recommend installing an application that allows you to generate your campaigns, instead of sending emails directly from your email provider.

These platforms allow you to configure the design of your email marketing campaigns with professional templates and offer you a range of functions such as: Creation of audience lists by characteristics, programming the sending of your emails, opening tracking, data reports to evaluate the success of your campaign and much more.

At ED Digital we recommend our clients to use Klaviyo , because it is an email marketing tool that is easy to set up and use; Besides, it includes many functionalities and integrations that will allow you to automate many processes in your business.

• Integration to the largest Ecommerce platforms and social networks
• Tracking the behavior of visitors to your website or your online store
• Professional designs of your email marketing campaigns with very striking templates
• Audience segmentation
• Sending special coupons, Newsletters, announcements and more
• Creation and management of campaigns
• Promotion tracking
• Data analytics and reporting

In addition to a wide variety of specific functions for each type of business and content you want to send, and that will make your campaigns contribute to increasing your sales and reducing abandoned cart rates.

How do I get subscribers for my email marketing campaigns?

Once you have set up your account with Klaviyo, it is essential that you create that first contact email with your subscribers. It can be to thank them for their subscription and offer them a 10% discount on their first purchase in exchange for giving you their email.

Then, add an eye-catching banner to your store so that visitors can enter their email and receive that thank you email that you prepared earlier. This will be the first contact with your potential clients, so make sure it is a clear, friendly banner and email that shows your commitment to the client and the brand.

Once this is done, now it's time to attract traffic to your store to progressively increase your number of subscribers. Of course, given the increase in privacy and data protection laws, we recommend adding the option "I do not wish to receive marketing emails" for your users, to avoid legal problems in the future.

Offer valuable content and increase your subscribers

Currently, the majority of Millennial and Generation Z buyers interact and buy from brands with which they share values ​​and ideas, and the rest of the buyers evaluate brands beyond their prices; That is why we recommend that you offer valuable content to your customers and potential visitors so that they identify with your brand and decide to subscribe to your list, without unsubscribing in the short term.

Our recommendation is that you use your blog as a connection tool, because it will help you tell your story as a business, your challenges, talk about how your products benefit your customers and the world, how they solve a problem, share advice and relevant information about your brand or products published in other blogs.

The blog not only serves to increase your subscribers with email marketing campaigns, but it can attract other visitors who find your articles in their search results. A blog is one of the best sources of organic traffic (free) to your page, which helps to position your website in search engines like Google or Bing in the long term. So take advantage of it, because a blog is a very powerful tool.

Build relationships and links

At the beginning, you need to attract the largest amount of traffic to your page and one of the best ways to do it is with what is known as "back linking"; that is, that other pages and publications talk about your product or your brand, and include links to your website.

Try to collaborate with publications or bloggers in the same sector as your business so that they talk about your brand, recommend your products or tell the success story of your business, in addition to including a link to your store on their blog. Look for blogs with excellent customer service, high engagement, and that have a strong connection with their audience, so that those readers visit your page.

The strategy is to create and provide a package of content and links, which are published on various pages and blogs related to your industry (for example, cosmetics blogs). The idea is to leverage each other's audience to help each other grow, create a very powerful and long-lasting relationship with these collaborators, and build authority for your brand.

Launch your first campaign

We often get a lot of questions about how to choose the first email list and what approach to take. When your list is still small, you can send more general emails about your company, your brand story, promotions, or announcements; And as it grows, you must segment the audiences to have better results.

You can start by sending emails to a small group of subscribers to test the results of the email and see if you need to make changes before sending it to a larger group. Evaluate if the users opened the sent email, how many took action, how many visited your page, how many bought or abandoned the cart, etc; so that you have a better idea of ​​the changes you will need to make before sending it to your entire list.

When we talk about segmenting your audiences, we mean that it is not the same to send a promotional email to someone who barely knows your brand, than to someone who is a recurring customer. Keep this in mind when creating your emails and campaigns.

Conclution

Building a solid email marketing subscriber list with engaged subscribers and repeat buyers takes time, but is a very powerful lead generation and long-term growth resource; That is why we offer these tips to increase your subscriber list organically and using tools and resources that help you automate your business and position yourself in search engines in the long term.

The wonder of technology is that it allows you to schedule much of this content ahead of time, so you can organize your time around other activities in your business. Remember that what is not measured does not grow; so take advantage of using the data to improve your email marketing campaigns and offer better campaigns as you gain experience.

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