Email newsletters are a simple way to reach your customers
Newsletters are a great way to reach your customers directly. By emailing them directly, you can give business updates or promote specific campaigns, while linking back to your website or product and event pages. Newsletters bring your business to customers’ attention by meeting them where they are already. Most people have email, and a lot of those people get email on a phone that they might have with them often. A newsletter, sent regularly, can become a direct dispatch to your most engaged customers, where you can build brand identity and keep customers up to date.
As Nextdoor explains, “as a small business owner, you know every interaction you have with potential customers is one that counts. Sending regular newsletter campaigns is an effective way to cultivate long-term relationships that are essential to your business’ growth.” These emails give a higher resolution impression of your business than a single image posted to a social media website. With newsletters, you can go into detail about your business, and what makes it unique. Do you offer a selection that can’t be found anywhere else in your area? Showcase that within your newsletter and give in depth descriptions of what you sell.
Nextdoor continues, “aside from fostering quality, intentional communication, newsletters can also be well worth the time and marketing dollars spent on creating them. In fact, research conducted by Litmus showed that for each dollar spent on email marketing, brands saw an average of 42 dollars in return.” This means that for every dollar invested into email newsletters, a company can see up to a 42x return, or more, on their investment.
Email marketing is so cost effective because you can reach an unlimited amount of people per email sent. You are only limited by the amount of people on your mailing list. An email with several links back to product pages, or one with advertising embedded in it (with display ads, affiliate links, or paid content) can have a high conversion rate, as it is sent to people who have likely already bought something from your business.
Most website building platforms have built in tools to collect emails and send newsletters. Squarespace has tools to help you build a newsletter right on your website’s dashboard. Mailchimp is a pretty common tool that can plug into most website builders.
Your newsletter doesn’t have to be weekly, or even monthly. You can send a quarterly, or even year end, update, as long as you keep your newsletter consistent. If you feel that you can add more emails, then add more. If you notice that less people are opening your emails, then send less. Email marketing is a great way to communicate directly to your customer, in a way that can be much more in depth than through other channels.
Is your business on social media yet?
Social media is the easiest way to reach your existing customers, while finding business at the same time. According to Forbes, “driven in no small part by the pandemic, Americans spent more than an average 1,300 hours on social media,” last year. Continuing, “Facebook led the way, where Americans spent an average 58 minutes a day on the app – or 325 hours a year.” Social media is how people communicate, pass time, and get information. If your business isn’t yet on social media, or if you aren’t posting regularly, then you are missing out on the ability to communicate directly to your clientele, and passing up an opportunity to promote your business efficiently.
1) Communicate directly to your customers
Social media gives you the ability to communicate directly to your customers. You can describe your business as you wish, and showcase your work the way that you want. Since posting doesn’t cost you anything, you can speak directly to your clientele whenever you want. Promote sales, use Stories to show how your business works. Go live to give a walkthrough in your retail store, or write a long post on Facebook thanking your customers for their business on a holiday. Social media gives you the flexibility to keep in communication with your audience, which helps keep your business in mind during purchase decisions.
2) Promote specific campaigns
Do you run sales seasonally, or do you need to promote an in-store event with a live musical performance? Do you have a book launch coming up, or throwing a customer appreciation night? You can use social media to promote time specific campaigns, like events or sales and keep customers up to date with special offerings from your business. Use Facebook Events to inform and remind customers of an event or date, and use Instagram to promote and inform potential attendees of the event as well. Social media helps you reach your customers to promote whatever you’re planning.
3) Reach a local audience
Social media is global, but you can also use it to reach a local audience. Use hashtags of your town, surrounding area, local publications, local businesses, your state, county, etc. and you’ll start to reach a local community of businesses, organizations and potential customers. Comment on content within these hashtags that you like or are in a similar industry as yours, or even begin to collaborate with other local businesses. Once you start to get more engaged with your local social media, you will begin to algorithmically surface in the feeds of other media users local to your business.
4) Automate ads
You can also automate your marketing with social media advertising. Find a targeted local audience of potential customers, or promote an online store to a much wider audience. Social media ads help you reach new and existing customers directly in their newsfeeds. You can target your ads by interest, location, or behavior, and the available tools are very effective and cost efficient.
5) Gain credibility in your field
The more you post about your field, if customers and other people on social media respond positively to the content, you’ll gain credibility in your field, as your posting will show that you know what you’re doing and are good at what you do. If you’re an artist and you post daily about your work and process, you’ll showcase that you’re an experienced artist. If you have a specialty retail store and post credible information about your wares, people who visit your profile will pick up on that.
Social media is the best way to reach your customers and find new business, as it’s free to post, and most people are on at least one social media platform. If your business isn’t on social media yet, you really should be, as it will likely only become more a part of how people engage with commerce. You don’t need to get on every platform immediately, and create new profiles on every new platform, but finding one or two platforms that you’re comfortable posting on will go a long way towards establishing an identity for your business online.
It has never been easier to start a business online
Have a business idea or a hobby that you want to start earning additional income with? Do you have a craft, or a product in mind that you want to bring to life? It has never been easier to start a business, and it is even easier to start a business online. You don’t even have to quit your job, and can start own your own business to earn supplemental income. If it becomes successful enough to become your sole source of income, then you can work for yourself. You get to set your own hours and your own pace.
Start today
1) All you need is a website
A simple website landing page for your new business can be made in as little as an hour. Modern website creation platforms like Squarespace and Wix make basic website creation simple, and are very cheap to continue using. You can purchase a custom .com domain for your business for around $20, and the platforms handle web hosting. Platforms like Shopify and Etsy have extremely robust, easy to use, commerce tools that you can use to create web stores, complete with shipping and automated marketing. Now that you have a website, you can turn a hobby into a small business, or start selling products and services to customers that may have never found you.
2) Social media helps you reach new customers
Start today
Now that you have a website, you can turn a hobby into a small business, or start selling products and services to customers that may have never found you. Add your website domain into your social media bio, and start posting to promote your new business. Post things that are relevant to your work, or start blogging from your website, and post those articles to your social media. Communicating on social media helps you share information about your business and what you do, while also engaging new and existing customers. You don’t have to over exert yourself either, just start with one or two channels that feel comfortable.
3) You can automate scheduling
If you’re monetizing a service that you can offer as a small business, like catering or dog walking, there are simple digital tools available that can help you automate customer scheduling. Square offers a service that can be connected to your social media accounts, where you can set your availability, then a potential customer pays for and schedules, never leaving your Instagram. Squarespace also offers a feature for this to happen on your .com domain. All you have to do is figure out how much time you have, set your availability, then let the digital tools do the rest. Once a customer schedules an appointment, you’ll be notified via push notification or email.
4) Bookkeeping tools are digital
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If you use your website to sell products or services, you’ll get insights on how your store performs over time. Squarespace offers detail rich data, like per-product conversion rates (or the percentage of people who buy a product after visiting a product page), and will visualize a click funnel that leads to purchase (or which pages lead to which purchases). This helps you figure out what is performing best, and what needs improvement. These platforms let you export this data, which you can import into something like QuickBooks to handle bookkeeping and taxes, automatically.
5) Incorporate online
You don’t have to incorporate right away when you start your business online. You can just start slowly, selling a few items here and there, while you learn how to operate an online business, and then incorporate when you plan to dedicate more time. Incorporating online has never been easier, and services like LegalZoom will handle the entire process for you. All you have to do is pay their fee, and tell them a little bit about yourself and your business. You’ll get an EIN number right away, and they’ll mail you your business’ paperwork when it is available.
It has never been easier to start a business online. You can work at your own pace, and accept as much business as you decide. You can start by selling very few things, and then grow to become an independent business owner. Digital tools make this a simple process, because you can scale from zero at the rate you decide. An online business can either be a hobby for your time off, or something that you create to begin a new career. What would your business be?
Why you should start selling your art online
If you’ve ever considered selling your art online, but haven’t started yet, here’s something you need to hear: why not? With today’s digital tools, you can start selling your art online, and potentially make your first sale, within a day. You don’t need to jump all the way into a new career, but there is potential for one to flourish from the first steps into selling your artwork via the internet. All you need is some art, a smartphone with a camera, and you’re good to go. If you have a laptop, even better, but the tools of today have made it remarkably easy to earn from your creative work.
1) It is easier than you think
If you have’t started selling your artwork because you think it is too difficult, or that you need to find gallery space, or that it’s too much of a technical problem to sell online; good news is that you’re wrong. It is very easy to get a basic online art store started, and you don’t need a gallery because you can list and market your own art. Really, all you need is a smartphone with a camera and your art. And a cell connection, or free wifi. You just have to use a service like Etsy, Squarespace, Shopify, etc. to begin (and they’ve done most of the work for you).
2) You don’t have to commit a lot of time
You can start and stop, create as much work as you like. You are setting the deadlines and can sell as much, or as little, as you want. The creation of your store and initial listings can take you as long as you want. Do it over the course of a year—it doesn’t matter, as long as you start your shop. Once your store is created, it’s your own space to do with what you will. List your back catalog of work for fun, or paint one painting a year. It’s your shop.
3) Shipping is simple
Gone are the days of going to a physical store to figure out how much shipping costs, then packing something up with overpriced materials. Most to all platforms to sell art on have robust shipping features built into their service. A platform like Etsy lets you save shipping profiles for your art, and automatically print a discounted label whenever you get a sale. Print the label at home, and drop your art off to ship at the nearest post office or USPS dropbox. You can even schedule for a mail carrier to pick your art up from your house or studio.
Start selling today
4) Selling online grows your market exponentially
Not only does selling your artwork online open your sales potential to a global market, but marketing your work on social media can help you gain traction and sales that you might never of had you only sold your wares offline. You can still be local and sell online, all you have to do is target marketing to your surrounding area, and focus your efforts there. Selling online means that anyone who enjoys art (many people), who may want to buy creative work (a lot of people), who are actively looking to buy artwork (more people than you think) is potentially a client for your creative practice. This doesn’t mean that everyone is going to buy your work, just that you have the potential to reach a wide range of people.
5) You can automate the process
If your artwork is digital, then you can even automate your sales process. All you have to do is create your listings, upload your work, and automatically send the file of your work to your customer automatically via email. If you are a graphic designer and want to sell clothes, prints, etc. with your work printed on them, there are services like Printful are integrated into Squarespace that will automatically print-on-demand and ship your art to an end customer, without you needing to do anything. You can even automate advertising for your listings on most platforms.
