Starting out with email marketing

If you are going to have an email list of potential customers then it’s better that you build it yourself from the ground up.  Start with your current customers, and everyone who has bought from you in the past.  Next, make sure you have a system so that every new customer you get is also added to your mailing list.  Automating this is best, but if you don’t know how to do this yet then put it in your diary every week to update your list manually.  And then every new enquiry, website download or anyone who comes to your stall at your local vegan fair needs to go into this list.  It doesn’t matter if you only start out with a list of just 20 people who have shown an interest in your business in the past, it will be a targeted list of people who already know you, have expressed at least a passing interest and that will already give you results.  It can be tempting to buy email lists.  Especially before the GDPR data-protection rules were introduced in May 2018, you could buy a list of thousands of email addresses, sorted by business sector, for a few hundred pounds.  I had a business that had a mailing list of 22,000 email addresses and 20,000 of them were bought contacts.  It worked, but to extremely small margins.  I knew I would be lucky to get a 3% open rate when I sent an email out – ie if I emailed all 22,000 on the list, only 660 people would open it – but we were working on big projects with big companies, so that gave us all the results we ever needed.  However, if I compare this to our Vegan Business Tribe mailing list (which is much smaller but made up of people who have registered for our free content, have joined as members or have met us at an event), we can get as high as 70% open rate on some emails, meaning we’re getting more people opening our emails with only a fraction of the number of people subscribed to the list.

Once you have this growing list of people you want to keep in contact with, you now need a way of sending out your emails.  Whatever you do, don’t just try and use your own personal email to send out to a mailing list.  You will get your account suspended by your email provider and your IP address added to a spam blacklist!  Instead, you need to use online software to send out the email for you in a safe and reliable way.  The software will also handle unsubscribes (a legal requirement) for you, allowing people to remove themselves from your email list by a single click on a link, rather than having to get in touch with you. There are lots of different online systems you can use and many have a free tier that you can use as long as you don’t mind having their badge on the bottom of your emails.  It’s worth noting that (currently) MailChimp also offer a 15% discount on their paid plans for nonprofits and charities.