Making the Case for Email Marketing

Email marketing is a free and effective way to interact with customers. It allows you to create personalized and targeted messages that can drive traffic to your business. Email marketing services usually offer a free service for up to a certain number of contacts and provide design templates that are easy to use.

However, it's important to remember that email marketing is an opt-in marketing tactic. This means that customers must first give you permission to send them emails before you can do so. It's also important to send relevant and valuable content, as customers are more likely to open and engage with emails that they find interesting and useful. And if something does go wrong, you need to be responsive and helpful. By doing so, you can build long-term relationships with customers and turn them into advocates for your business.

Collecting customers’ emails can be as easy as adding a section to their bill/receipt to input their information to sign-up for future offers. If you run in-house promotions, you can have customers fill out their email address on the entry form. Also, you can easily embed a form on your website that allows customers to subscribe to news and updates. If you don’t have a website for your business and you’re not sure where to start, the email marketing platform we’ll be discussing also provides website services.

One of the best-known email marketing services in the field is Mailchimp. Mailchimp is a one-stop shop for small businesses to manage their digital marketing. It offers a variety of features, including:

• Multichannel campaign support: Mailchimp allows you to create and manage email, social media, and advertising campaigns all in one place.

• Website-building tools: Mailchimp also offers a website builder, so you can create a professional website even if you don't have any coding experience.

• Reports: Mailchimp provides detailed reports on the performance of your campaigns, so you can see what's working and what's not.

• Marketing automation: Mailchimp's marketing automation tools allow you to send automated emails, social media posts, and other messages to your customers based on their behavior.

In short, Mailchimp has everything small businesses need to get started with digital marketing. It's an easy-to-use platform with a wide range of features, and it's also relatively affordable. Let’s dive even deeper in to Mailchimp for your business.

Try Before You Buy

Mailchimp offers a free version of their services that accommodates up to 500 email contacts and up to 1,000 monthly email sends. It also includes basic email templates, multichannel tools to promote and grow your business such as landing pages, Facebook, and Instagram ads (which we’ve discussed in previous Newsletters), and smart design and content tools like Mailchimp’s Creative Assistant.

Then Get Creative (Or Let Mailchimp Do it For You)

Creative Assistant gets to know your brand and then creates designs for you instantly, helping you get more attention and traffic. It imports your brand’s assets and houses them in a brand kit, allowing you to create custom designs using your brand colors, fonts, logos, and images. It uses design best practices and AI to ensure your multichannel campaigns are both beautiful and consistent, but lets you edit, resize, and publish easily, too.

Fashion Meets Function

If you’d like to be more hands on and create your own design from start to finish, you can choose one of Mailchimp’s templates and customize it to your liking. Just drag-and-drop different sections into your email template, whether it’s text or images. Add color, logos and even insert Button links to direct customers to a specific website or social media page. The designer is extremely simple to use, so you'll grasp it within a few minutes.

A few examples of email marketing options that you could send to your customers are a $5 free play offer, ½ off an appetizer, buy 1 get one 50% off or happy hour specials. These are all great options to capture the customer’s attention and give them even more of a reason to frequent your establishment. Once your email template is complete, it’s ready to send. You can choose which contacts you’d like to market to and send out your campaign. You can then follow up on your campaigns and view the reporting numbers.

Keep Track of Your Progress

From the campaign page, select the campaign you wish to review, and select its report. Mailchimp produces a report with an overview of your campaign's performance, including audience activity and click performance, demographics, time and social performance, and geolocation. You can filter these results by bounces, clicks, opens, and unsubscribes. This is a quick and easy way to see which campaigns are successful and which are not.

Marketing in any aspect can seem like a daunting task at times, but we’re committed to providing you with the best options to help grow your business. Successful marketing requires maintaining a consistent presence without becoming intrusive. As the owner, it is your responsibility to drive the business within the confines of your establishment and navigate the challenges of today's competitive landscape. Never overlook the importance of regular engagement with your customers, both online and in person. We hope that some of our suggestions will aid you in gaining traction and reaching a broader audience. We’ll provide you with tools and services that offer free versions, have affordable paid options, and are easy to use. We want to help you become great marketers and Mailchimp’s services are a great place to start.