3 Key Steps for Building Community with Email Marketing
Written by Jen Siomacco and Brittinee Phillips. Meet Our Team.
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As a small business owner, building community with your customers and audiences is a key priority. With so many marketing channels to reach your target audience across, i.e. social, digital ads, print, you cannot overlook the power of email.
When you figure out the best approach to your email marketing and the email service provider (ESP) that meets your needs, you can establish a seamless, personalized conversation via email with your most loyal and engaged customers.
Unsure where you should begin as a small business? Here are 3 key steps for building community with email marketing:
1. Choose an Email Marketing Platform
You must find the email marketing platform that works best for your needs — both for the expectant number of customers you’ll be in contact with via email each month and the monthly, or yearly, budget you have set aside for payment to use the platform. There are hundreds of different email marketing platforms, also referred to as ESPs. Below are are five platforms that VVITCH suggests considering:
Flodesk - this platform is easy to use when you decide to design your email templates. It’s also easy to create lead magnets and automated email sequences to nurture your audience. However, one negative of Flodesk is its poor analytics.
Mailchimp - this platform is great because it has multiple free options. While it is less design-oriented for those who want to design or code their own templates, Mailchimp makes up for it by being very easy to use (i.e. drag and drop functionality).
Omnisend - this platform is another great free option, especially for e-commerce brands. Omnisend has powerful integrated marketing with Shopify, which is a win-win for those using it for their e-commerce platform.
Hubspot - this platform is considered a very powerful CRM and inbound marketing tool. It now also offers integrated email marketing for those who passed on Hubspot in the past.
Litmus - this platform offers some features that you don’t often receive with other email marketing platforms, such as email testing. This feature allows you to test how emails will display for folks across a variety of devices and email clients. Litmus even can test in Dark Mode!
Klaviyo - this platform is the ideal all-in option for utilizing email, SMS, and push notifications. If you’re an e-commerce brand using Shopify, the platform has an integration that makes it easy to acquire reviews
Kit (fka Convertkit) - this platform is great for service providers, thought leaders, and creators. Designed for digital creators, Kit offers easing integrations for selling digital products and monetizing your newsletter.
beehiiv - this platform is another great option for creators. Built with scaling and monetization in mind, beehiiv comes with an ad network built in making it easy to profit off of your platform
Once you have found the right email marketing platform for your business needs, the next focus point is your email list. Don’t have a robust list already? Building and growing an email list can feel tricky without a solid lead magnet.
2. Develop a Lead Magnet to Grow Your List
A lead magnet is any giveaway or freebie that demonstrates your value and provides your audience with a sense of what kind of content they can expect to receive from your brand in the future. This giveaway or freebie can be a PDF, an Airtable or Typeform questionnaire, but ultimately it should be an engaging and helpful piece of information for your audience.
What does this type of giveaway or freebie look like in real life? VVITCH offers a few free resources and guides that are lead magnets, such as:
You can be creative with what giveaway or freebie you want to provide your target audience, plus you can also use it as a call-to-action (CTA) across email, social, and paid ads.
3. Build a Nurturing Sequence
Now that you have people signing up for your mailing list, it’s time to use this new marketing tool to your advantage. In order to have success with email marketing you have to actually remember to send emails!
Here at VVITCH, we really encourage folks to write a few different type of emails:
Newsletter emails that are more focused on sharing new features/products and also discuss any trending topics.
Content series emails are recurring series that are relevant to your business. For example, if you run a fashion brand, perhaps you want to share outfits one day a week.
Promotional and Sales emails help you promote a particular product, service or launch.
Nurturing Sequence Emails are a series of automated emails that are spaced out and intended to build a more personal relationship with your audience over the course of several weeks/months/years, depending on your customer’s lifecycle with your brand.
Are you ready to start building community with email marketing for your small business? With these 3 key steps you can achieve growth and engagement within a few months.
Still unsure how you can apply the above steps with your business? VVITCH can be a trusted partner for your small business. Learn more about the full services we offer by contacting our team.
Jen Siomacco - Founder and UX Designer
Jen has worked in technology, marketing, and publishing for ten years. After years as a CX/UX designer in the corporate world, Jen put her skills to work as one of the owners of Catalyst Wedding Co.
After seeing both the corporate and entrepreneurial world, Jen is committed to helping feminist small businesses grow into revolutionary brands.
Brittinee Phillips - Copywriter
Brittinee has worked in marketing for a little over ten years. She has a passion and talent for storytelling. Brittinee's philosophy is that storytelling is the most integral part of the consumer and product experience, which is why she makes it a focal point in her approach to product and brand messaging.
