Advertising and marketing can be among the biggest expenses in a company’s budget. Determining where to invest marketing dollars is key. There is a ton of ways to promote your handmade business. However, these ways can’t replace the value of having newsletters as a component of a well-rounded marketing program. As, email marketing for handmade businesses is essential.
The Importance of Newsletters
Newsletters for handmade businesses are a good, low effort way to keep in touch with customers and connect with people who may be interested in your products. This is a key factor in email marketing for handmade businesses. With today’s desktop publishing software, newsletters are easy to produce in appealing formats and send instantaneously to everyone on your business email list. Sending newsletters on a regular basis reminds readers about your business.
One big benefit of newsletters for handmade businesses is that you have control of all the content. Newsletters can educate readers about new products, new collaborations, share successes, and announce upcoming events or promotions. They even can serve as another advertising vehicle by offering coupons or specials only for those who read the newsletter.
Newsletters are also perfect to reach the correct target market, as well as getting a better reach and visibility. This is because you’ll be reaching the people who already have shown an interest by buying a product from you. Or people who have signed up for your business email list. The best thing about this is that you already know your audience’s buying preferences. Therefore you can address topics that you know will interest these reader. This also can be a better way to convert sales; even better than social media. Newsletters do this in a friendly, unobtrusive way, by informing and keeping the audience updated without overtly asking for a sale.
Ultimately, Compared with other advertising and marketing strategies, newsletters are relatively inexpensive to produce. Most newsletters are sent electronically, eliminating even the cost of paper and postage stamps.
How to Build an Email List From Scratch
This will be the first step email marketing process for your handmade business. It will be important that you research the right platform that aligns with your needs as a business, as well as research how to write and advertise for a successful marketing campaign. If you’re not sure where to begin, try searching for educational youtube videos that give you a brief in selecting the right platform.
Choose A Trustworthy Email Marketing Platform
The beginning step to building an email list is to select an email marketing platform. At first, sending basic email campaigns and managing your first contacts may be feasible through platforms like Gmail and Outlook. If you’re just starting, it may be wise to get familiar with this first, however, it should not be a long term strategy for email marketing for handmade businesses.
Once you start having more subscribers, you need to efficiently manage and organize your growing email list, as well as send automated email campaigns. You will need a reliable email marketing tool to do this. You must obtain a platform that can grow with you as your business expands, and be able to rely on its features to create engaging emails.
A proper Email marketing platform should have several features to help make sending emails easier. You can keep track of open and click rates for each email with a service like this. The most popular services are Mailchip and Klaviyo, although, there are many other reliable services as well.
Sign Up Forms
Once you choose the best Email marketing platform for your handmade business you’ll be able to see that one of the features it should give you is the ability to create sign up forms. It’s good practice to have your sign up forms appear as high up on your site as possible so your visitors don’t miss it.
Keep in mind this should be a designated online place for visitors to type in their email address and click on a “sign up” button, to join your email list. You won’t want to get too fancy with this as far as design and wording. Less is more in this scenario.
Continue to try to have your form in as many logical places as possible, such as: about page, testimonials page, checkout confirmation page, blog, etc.
You don’t want to make your website look spammy and distracting when configuring a plan for email marketing for handmade businesses. There is a balance. Keep in mind that it’s likely website visitors won’t be looking at all of the pages of your site. Try to add this form in a way that they can see it in every place without being an overkill of advertisement.
Offer An Incentive
Once you’ve got your sign up forms added to your site, something that can add a huge boost of conversions and grow your email list is by offering an incentive.
The best kind of incentives are the ones you see over and over again. Types of incentives that customers are most likely to take advantage of are a discount codes, free shipping offers, or gift cards. You can even do a monthly product giveaway to get people involved! This can be a good way to gather emails too.
If you don’t offer any incentive, you can expect your list to grow a lot slower. You should understand that your email list will not grow without traffic. So, offering an incentive can be a good option to keep traffic flowing in an authentic and organic way. We all want everyone to be as excited about our website as we are, but the truth of the matter is, you will need to apply effort to see recognizable results.
Manually Reach Out To Your Personal Contacts
If you are just starting, you can reach out to your personal contacts when configuring how to build your email list. There are likely at least a few people on your contact list that would be interested in signing up for your business’s newsletter. Send an email to let them know that you are creating an email list for your handmade business and explain why it will be beneficial for them to sign up.
You can also encourage your friends, family, and colleagues to share the news with their own contact list. You can do the same thing if you have a user base for your products, but don’t have an email list for promoting content. Reach out to your user. Ask them if they would also like to receive your emails regarding your latest and greatest content. Try to get as creative as you can when building out your email list.
Create a Personalized CTA (call-to-action)
CTAs, or Call-to-actions have a 42% higher view-to-submission rate than call-to-actions that are the same for all visitors. These are the people who visit your blog post or web page who are looking for something specific. Therefore, your CTA needs to meet those unique needs for email marketing for handmade businesses.
A great idea to roll this into action is to encourage your audience to subscribe to your email list by including a simple CTA like “click here to download our best seller catalog”. Make sure to include CTAs on your landing page, as well to list them with each blog article you write.
If you offer content directly related to your visitor’s needs, your email newsletter won’t feel like a pushy advertisement. Instead, it will feel helpful and valuable. In most cases, people are excited to learn when given the opportunity. Take advantage of this by using smart SEO words and phrases.
Include a CTA on Your About Us Page
Your “about us” page is one of the most potent pages in terms of conversion potential for email marketing for handmade businesses. Ideally, your “about us” page will prime visitors to want more from your business. Although, it might not be enough to convince them to purchase from you. A CTA that encourages them to sign up for a newsletter is easier to concede to than a “buy now” plea. This is a smart way to connect and engage with your audience. They will read what your business is about.
Once you get their attention with this action, make sure to leave them something that makes them want to know more. This is a great opportunity to link something special about yourself or your business. Be sure to make good use of it.
Create a Pop-up for Your Website
Think about timed pop-up ads or onsite retargeting. After a user spends a certain amount of time on your page, he or she can receive a pop-up relevant to the content on that page. Pop-ups aren’t always appealing. But if done correctly, you’re able to appeal to your visitors with quality content when and where they need it. This is a key factor that will play into the success of your business; being able to know and understand your customer’s needs before they even know they have them.
You must have user experience in mind when creating your pop-up forms. This ensures that your pop-ups are relevant and well-timed. Your pop-up can be simple and straightforward, without the need to spend tons of time and effort to create it. Keep in mind the type of content you enjoy seeing when you visit your favorite online stores. Consider the types of advertisements that annoy you as a shopper, as well, so you can avoid that type of content.
If you already have a clear understanding of your audience, you can leverage that and create a more visual form that also emphasizes the value of your offer. Don’t be afraid to show off your creative skills here. You can make it fun without making it complicated. This is a good opportunity for you to learn new things as a business owner too. Take a webinar class or a brief YouTube tutorial course to understand how to get the most out of your website and pop-up designs.
Email marketing for Shopify and Etsy users should also be something to consider and research during this process. As email marketing for Shopify and Etsy users will help bring success to your online shops, especially if you’re using these platforms as your main website hub for your business.
Create A High-Converting Landing Page
When building your email list from scratch, it’s smart to utilize other ways apart from your homepage. In this case, you can utilize this feature by creating one or more landing pages that are directly linked to your Instagram ads, Facebook ads, etc.
For example, let’s say you want to offer free shipping, an exclusive offer, or a limited-time sale. It’s far better to direct users to a dedicated landing page than send them to your homepage and risk them getting lost.
To create a high-converting landing page, you need two key elements:
A strong headline emphasizing the benefits that the users receive.
A powerful image to accompany the message.
Pitch your email newsletter on your socials
You might not have a long list of email subscribers, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a network. If you have followers on Instagram, Facebook, or other social media channels, you can use those firm and loyal connections to build out your email list for email marketing for your handmade business.
Try pitching an email newsletter on your social media accounts. Your audience there already knows you. They like you and your business, but they aren’t necessarily the same people who receive your newsletter. Give them the option to opt into your email subscription. You can do this by making a story that links to the sign up page, or creating a post that leads to the link in your bio. There are a lot of great options to get creative with this CTA.
If you don’t have a lot of followers, or you just started setting up your business in social media, you could also include a link in your email signature. That link could go directly to your email newsletter. It could also be a link to a blog post or landing page with email subscription CTA’s.
Building an email list from scratch cannot happen overnight. But once you start implementing this tips you’re increasing your chances of building your new email list, you’ll quickly learn how some methods will work better than others. What’s important is to combine these methods and get the best possible result for email marketing for your handmade business.
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