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Every business wants to survive. They don't want to close up and die.
This means that most businesses try to grow. They know they'll lose a few customers over time so it's best to increase their customer base over time to counteract that.
And then there are businesses that want to grow so they can help and serve more people. They believe in their product or service and want to get it to as many people as possible. (And also get those people to use it as much as possible, so the customer gets as much value as possible)
Sales and marketing are the primary drivers of a business's growth. They get the word out there to potential customers, nurture those customers, sell the products and services to them, and over-time turn those customers into fans.
Email and email marketing can help with every one of those goals.
Email marketing benefits
Email and email marketing can help with every one of those goals.
- emails are easily shareable and have a near 0 distribution cost
- emails let you build up and nurture a relationship with your customers
- emails let you promote and sell your products and services, without going through middlemen and distributors
- and email lets you continue the relationship after the first sale.
In this guide I'll show you the absolute minimal amount of email marketing you need for your Shopify store.
A list
The first step to email marketing is to decide on a service to store your list of subscribers (called "a list" or even "the list"). Your list is your biggest asset in email marketing. It's the connection to the people behind the email addresses - your prospects, leads, customers, and fans.
Don't confuse where its value is though: the list has value only in that it's the connection to your customers and prospects. If your list if full of fake addresses, unresponsive people, or people that don't fit your customer profile, it has little value.
Picking a reputable company to store your email list is vital. A bad choice can destroy your list (your asset) and your brand name.
Imagine if the provider you used sold your list of customers to a spammer who sent spam from your company? Or if they sold your list to your competitor?
There are a variety of email service providers I'd recommend but for the most minimal setup, most people should use either Aweber, Mailchimp, or Drip.
You might think storing the list internally is best, using a free or inexpensive system. As someone who maintained this at another software company for years, I advise strongly against it. There are more considerations to email marketing than just having a list of people that you send email to. Considerations that a hosted email service provider handles that you won't be able to. Spam reports, blacklisted IPs, bounce rates, sender domain...
A subscriber offer
The next component to getting started with email marketing is a subscriber offer.
Basically, a subscriber offer is where you exchange something of value to a potential subscriber for joining your list.
This offer could take many forms:
- a discount on your products
- education about your products
- education about the industry
- a guide or whitepaper about a topic (like this guide)
The worst offer you can provide is "news about your company". Let's face it, most of your customers don't care about your company. They care about their businesses, their problems, and how your company can help them with them. They might care about your software because they use and get value out of your software, and they want to make sure it continues to be valuable to them.
But they don't care about your company.
The first three types of offers are a coupon and ongoing information. The coupon is easy to understand: people love discounts. The value of the offers for the second and third are in getting the emails from you.
The fourth example offer is an interesting one.
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