How to grow your small business with a customer email list

By Daniel Reid

Want to grow your small business? Forget appointment reminders. Your customer email list can open up a whole new world of unexplored possibilities.

Do you collect email addresses from customers? You should. Unlike a lot of other information small businesses often collect after a sale, like home addresses or birthdays, email addresses can help you increase revenues and make deeper connections with existing customers.

What makes an email list so valuable? Email is a direct way to communicate with customers and it is also intimate. Your emails sit in your customer’s inbox, snuggled up close with other important messages from friends and family, and can be read at a time that is convenient for them.

Customer email lists also happen to be an information goldmine that can be tapped to offer other ways to communicate with customers and help you find other people like them.

Now that you know why customer email lists are so important, here’s how you can leverage them to grow your small business:

1. Find similar customers

Everything they say about Facebook is true: they do make money from your data and, yes, it is a little creepy. Facebook can look at your customer file, that includes email addresses, match the customers to their profiles and then identify an audience that is similar to your existing customers, in terms of interests, demographics, etc.

Facebook’s mysterious audience-matching algorithm removes a lot of the guesswork from advertising and helps you target people who are similar to your customers and are therefore much more likely to convert.

LinkedIn has introduced a similar feature and while it’s significantly more expensive it could still be worthwhile if you are interested in connecting with an audience of professionals.

2. Send a newsletter

Newsletters can announce upcoming promotions, inform audiences about important information and showcase your brand’s expertise on relevant topics. Underneath it all, they are so much more.

The simple act of sending a newsletter to a customer is an act in trust building. Your customer trusts you enough to receive and hopefully engage with the information you’re sending. Once this trust is established, your customer is much more likely to take action.

To be successful, your newsletter should be more than just a glorified product promotion: it needs to feel friendly, like an email from a trusted friend, and it must include information your audience actually wants to read.

But before you start telling your customers about your upcoming event, make sure to get their explicit permission first. If they didn’t directly sign up for your newsletter, and provided their email for another purpose, they will be more likely to unsubscribe or report your email as spam after its unannounced arrival.

You should either include your newsletter as part of your regular email communications with customers, send an email to your list asking if they’d like to subscribe or directly ask customers to sign up.

3. Re-engage your top customers via ads

You can use your customer file that includes email addresses to create ads that will follow your audience around the web.

Use Google ads to let your customers know about new products while they watch videos on YouTube. Use LinkedIn ads to tell customers about an upcoming workshop while they check job listings. Use Facebook ads to remind customers to complete a purchase if they’ve left an item abandoned in their shopping cart.

Wherever your customers spend their time online, you can find them and connect with them in an unobtrusive way via ads.

4. Get customer feedback

What do your customers think about your business? What would they like to change? Why not reach out to your customers via email to get them to complete a survey?

Surveys can teach you a lot about your own business but they also show accountability and respect for your customers.

At the end of your survey, you should also ask customers to leave you a (positive) review on Google and Yelp.

5. Send personalized emails

The days of one-size-fits-all marketing are over. Customers expect content to be tailored to their exact needs. More than half of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t make an effort to personalize communications to them. 

You can use tools like Mailchimp to segment email lists based on purchase history, postal code or any other factor you think might differentiate one customer from another. You can then send customized emails to these separate groups that you already know will be relevant.

By delivering hyper-relevant messages to customers, you are six times more likely to drive a conversion.

Conclusion

The hard work is done: you already have a list of customer emails. Now you just need to unlock its potential by using it to retarget existing customers, attract look-alike customers and send smart, effective communications via surveys, personalized emails and newsletters.

If you need a little help building your email list and using it to grow your business, get in touch with us. We can help you prepare and distribute newsletters and create effective social media campaigns to target existing and look-alike customers.