Your small business’ email newsletters can help you reap greater long-term benefits. Check out these easy email marketing content ideas!
As a small business owner, we often try on every marketing technique under the sun. Many small business owners, however, ignore email marketing, believing it’s no longer a “thing.”
But email marketing is one of the most result-oriented and cost-effective marketing techniques available–some studies showing it reaps 4x the return of other channels. Why? Largely because it’s a one-to-one communication.
And email newsletters are an easy and cost-effective way to stay connected and offer value to customers and prospects, even if you have only five subscribers! The following list will help make sure you never run out of ideas for your email newsletters:
1. Industry Related Tips
Business-topic-related tips grab the audience’s interest, because those who subscribe to email newsletters do so out of pure interest. Your subscribers are curious, and WANT your insights and tips, and potentially news about your brand, so there’s not much better than you fulfilling that need.
Educate and inform them on the industry that brings you and them together–you’ll be giving them an edge, and strengthening your bond, too.
For example, if you have a small business selling ethically produced or recycled clothes, your email marketing campaign should cover the fashion industry from all aspects. This includes informing audiences of how you recycle/produce clothes. These qualities make slow fashion worth the investment, how ethical fashion improves the local economy, how fast fashion contributes to pollution, etc.
2. Tips on Your Expertise
Since almost every industry is saturated, standing apart from the many competitors can be difficult based on products or services alone. Hence, you need to build a rapport with your audience about why they need to give you a chance to serve them.
This means sending out email newsletters that highlights your industry expertise. The topics for these emails might range from sharing your vision for your company, to the advanced technology you use (and how that benefits them). Stories are a great tool for this, allowing you to show the audience that you know what you’re talking about, getting their imaginations in action, and building their trust in you. All of which can encourage them to give you a chance!
3. General but Related Information
Email newsletters on general but related information include topics on general skills, or tips that allow you to serve your customers better. They don’t have to be the primary skills that help you earn money. Instead, they should be general life skills that anyone can use and benefit from, but that your audience, interested in your specific industry, can especially find useful!
For example, if you have a small house-painting business, share tips on cleaning and brightening homes. Topics like the best ways to achieve clean, streak-free windows or tips to brighten the home for holidays relate to your audience’s interest in home upkeep.
4. Team or Partner Introduction
Email marketing is about building a trustworthy relationship with the audience. As a small business, take time to introduce yourself, your partner, and your team members. Be playful with it and make it an extensions of your brand style.
People today are so much more conscious of the people who provide them with services, and they want to like who they do business with. Knowing that the people helping them are not different from themselves allows them to trust the brand more.
5. Tips, Hacks, and Favorites from Team
Once you find success with presenting general but related information in email newsletters, take it to the next level by curating a marketing campaign with recommendations and suggestions from your team.
Favorite products, hacks, and tips from the brand owner, partner, or staff members come off as genuine and thus cultivate trust.
6. New Launches
Email marketing, even if subtle and long-term, has the potential to be a highly targeted form of marketing. Segment your audience according to their interests and/or relationship to you. Then get your audience excited about new products or services – consider even giving clients a sneak-peek at offerings before they become available to the general public.
7. Benefits of What You Offer
Email newsletters can effectively inform the audiences about your service while subtly encouraging them to use your services. You might want to write about the benefits of a service you offer that not everyone knows about, or a “next step” service that a particular segment hasn’t yet tried.
8. How-To Guides
Add how-to guides for your products to inform audiences about using them, caring for or maximizing their benefits, and making them last longer.
9. Answer the Audience’s Questions
Every business “should” have FAQs (a Frequently Asked Questions section) on their website that allows the audience to learn more about it.
FAQs can include customer rights, exchange policies, and other information that helps build trust with the audience. Why not include one in each of your email newsletters? Encouraging people to reply to your emails with their questions is ALSO a good way to boost engagement and help email deliverability (because recipients’ email services will consider you to be a more-wanted sender).
10. Industry News and Opinions
Besides keeping the audience informed on your small business’s role in the industry, you can also send email newsletters about industry news and opinions. This allows you to make the connection from digital marketing to real life.
For example, if an industry expo, webinar, or event is happening, you can send out an email newsletter that your business will be attending the event. You can invite your audience to find you at the event and how excited you are about it. Post-event, you can send another newsletter with positive words and photographs of your brand’s representation.
Finally, make sure that every email newsletter is thoughtfully designed and pleasant to look at and read. There’s no rule about length – you need to test that with your own audience segments – just avoid an email that looks overwhelming.
Read more ideas for getting better results from your website here. And If you have questions or want help getting your newsletter rolling, be sure to schedule a call today!
Photo by Yogas Design on Unsplash
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