Email marketing, like all online marketing, requires that you keep people interested. You can’t just flood your contacts’ inboxes with emails and expect the sales leads to roll in. You need to provide something interesting and useful to your subscribers. Reward your email subscribers with occasional perks–access to an online sale a few days early, a code for free shipping, or just a simple “mention this email for 20% off your meal.”

Think about how often you should be sending out updates. Once a month is a good minimum to stick to, but if you have a business such as a restaurant or retail location that has weekly specials, you may want to do every week or every two weeks.  Do not send out email newsletters that don’t provide something useful or interesting simply because you’re trying to stick to a schedule. Most importantly, keep your emails short, sweet and enjoyable. A long, boring mass email is very simply not going to be read. Ask yourself–if this showed up in my inbox, would I take the two minutes it takes to read it?

Using a service like MailChimp can help you get the word out about each new blog post you publish. Although your subscribers might not always remember to visit your business blog, if they receive an email from you once or twice a month sharing the latest news and blog posts, they’ll return to your site and you’ll stay on their radar.

If you’re ready to get started, MailChimp has a great guide to getting started with email marketing, and loads of other guides for specific aspects of email marketing. And if you want to start using email marketing but just don’t have the time, we can help! We provide email marketing campaigns through MailChimp for many of our clients, and we’d love to help with yours. Get in touch with us by phone or email, or on Twitter or Facebook.