Supercharge Your Business With Email Marketing

The Space.Talks in partnership with Barcelona Activa are back in full swing, where top industry leaders share invaluable tips, trends, and insider knowledge that you don’t learn in traditional classrooms!

Stephanie Schwab, Digital Marketing Programme Director at Harbour.Space and CEO & Founder of Crackerjack Marketing, was one of our most recent speakers, sharing her thorough understanding of email marketing and its ability to provide an excellent return on investment of both time and money.

During her Space.Talk, Stephanie spoke about nurturing your customers through the use of email marketing so they can remember your company, refer to it, and eventually, buy from it.

Crackerjack Marketing is a digital marketing agency based in Chicago and “specialises in social media, content marketing and influence marketing”, and as CEO and founder, Stephanie knows how to deliver impressive results using digital and social media marketing strategies for various client types. She has over 15 years of experience in e-commerce and digital media and has worked with top brands such as Target, Pernod-Ricard, Citizen Watch, and Abbott.

In her Space.Talk, she specifically spoke about boosting your small business with email marketing. Here are the two most important takeaways of her Space.Talk:

Some people might think that emails are a thing of the past, but they can’t be more wrong. As we learned a year ago in Jessica Best’s Space.Talk about The Good, the Bad and the WOW of Email Marketing, “today, email marketing is just as important and relevant as it was 20 years ago”. There’s no better way to connect and stay in contact with your customers than through their inbox. 

And, as Stephanie told us in her talk, it’s the best channel to:

• Stay in people’s top of mind
• Build expertise and trust
• Encourage customer engagement
• Increase sales
• Learn more about your customers
• Provide an excellent Return on Investment (ROI)

Therefore, your number one priority is to build an opt-in or create a “sign-up” strategy to gather subscribers so you can send them regular emails and transform those subscribers into customers. 

There are three types of emails: welcome, broadcast and, nurturing.

• The first one is the one you send as soon as people sign-up. It should welcome your new subscriber and it’s where you tell your company’s or product’s story.
• Broadcast email is for events, sales, new products and partner offers. Use this one only as needed, because you don’t want to badger your future customer to the point where he unsubscribes to your emails. 
• The most important emails are the nurturing ones. These should be sent weekly, they have to be content-rich and they should inspire, entertain or connect with your audience. They should give some type of value so they remember your company, refer to it, and, of course, buy from it. Your mission is to send emails that create an emotional connection every week. They should be conversational, written in first person, with short sentences and a big font (14), and they should be so good that you’d read it! 

Remember to always write something that adds value and that, in the end, has a singular call to action. Also, keep it short, avoid spammy words and, if you can, personalize the subject field with the name of the subscriber. 

So you don’t get lost, try to have an editorial calendar and send these weekly emails in the recipient’s time zone (i.e. early morning for US citizens, late morning for Spanish citizens). Finally, remember to use Word or Google docs to write your emails (in case your email platform crashes), and stay ahead of time. Use your calendar to schedule content in advance, especially with holidays such as Halloween and Christmas.  

If you want to keep learning the nuts and bolts of social media and content marketing, Stephanie’s module starts on January 31st. In it, you will learn why content marketing is useful, how to use it and how to develop a comprehensive strategy for your business. Check it out and apply here.

If you found this Space.Talk interesting join us for the next one; follow us on Instagram to get all the details. And, if you are interested in learning more about Digital Marketing, check our programme or take a look at Harbour.Space’s website to see other programmes that might help your professional development. Finally, you can write to us at hello@harbour.space to let us know your inquiries and thoughts.