Email Marketing: The Why & The What

Following the trend of what I did the other week for social media management, I thought that talking a little bit about email marketing would be a good thing to do as this is something I also do for a number of clients.

The amount of times you go on a website these days and get one of those annoying ‘sub to our mailing list’ boxes is getting ridiculous and I have to put my hands up and say that I’m guilty of being the person behind those!

Email marketing is a way of marketing to someone straight to their inbox and in doing so there some amazing things that can come out of it. We’re just starting to fully use email marketing at Seaside Creative.

As a marketing agency, Seaside Creative use email marketing as not just a way of directly selling but also a way of showing our expertise in our field whether that be PR, Photography or social marketing by writing small articles about these subjects within the email. We often include business updates in the emails we send out as a way to inform people and make them aware that we are getting business. I suppose this is also a selling point as you wouldn’t opt to spend your money with an agency that isn’t getting any work.

The way our mailing list works is that we send out a welcome email to people who have given us their business card. We then aim to send out an email to our subscribers once a month. This is a great way of building the relationship we have with our existing or potential clients. It can also help personalise our brand and bring a more personal touch which can be helpful when winning business as people buy people.

A completely different client that I help run the mailing list for is a restaurant client. The change in type of business means that people have signed up to the mailing list differently and for different reasons.
For example; just recently I sent out an email advertising the restaurant’s christmas menu and told subscribers that they could now book their tables for christmas day.
But then I later on announced it to the public through their social channels. This way the people who are subscribed to the mailing list feel as though they had priority and will stay subscribed to the list for further updates before than anyone else.
It’s these little incentives that maintain the mailing list - which is what you want to do, as well as grow it of course!

Which brings me to…


4 Things You Need To Do To Grow Your Mailing List:

1. Plug the hell out of it on socials... One of the most straightforward ways to get people to subscribe to a mailing list is to make sure they know it exists and how to sign up for it. Social media is a great way to do this and the more creative you can get with the posts the better engagement you are likely to get.


2. Shamelessly ask for shares… This is a great way of being blunt about trying to get your message put there, just make sure you put a ‘subscribe to the mailing list’ button in the email so people from third parties can easily get on board.


3. Offer them free stuff… Okay so the more technical term for this is ‘gated offer’ and is basically what I said at the start. Just make sure that the thing you’re offering attracts the right audience. For example, for the restaurant client, a good gated offer would be ‘get 10% off your next meal when you subscribe for updates’


4. Have a mailing list clean up… So this one is a bit like cutting your hair so it can grow longer and stronger. You want to make sure that your mailing list is full of active readers of your emails as opposed to dead email address or people who just aren’t opening your emails - which will boost you analytics report! A quick easy way to do this is just to send out a ‘resubscribe’ email allowing active people to tell you that they are still reading.


There are so any benefits to email marketing for any business to both generate leads and to inform people of what the business is up to. It’s also a great way to showcase your expertise which may help persuade someone to do business with you.