Email Marketing and Branding Strategies with Blair Brown
Blaire Brown is the founder and CEO of Visionary Advantages, a Brand Strategy Group that focuses on helping businesses with their marketing and branding initiatives. Completely obsessed with entrepreneurship, she also helps aspiring entrepreneurs launch their businesses strategically to get out of “hobby mode” and into a successful operating business venture. She is also the host of the Curate Your Success Podcast.
Blair and I had a conversation on my podcast “Adding Chrome to Your Community” in august of 2024, this blog was based on our conversation.
Blair was asked, “Why is email marketing so important?”
Well, I'm gonna throw a stat out there, because we love a good stat over here on emails is definitely not dead. Email generates $42 for every $1 spent, which is a 40 200% return on investment, that's huge.
Another reason why you should invest in email marketing, is that you are always going to be in control of your email marketing. You're not always in control of social media. For example, a few months ago, Instagram had a moment where it blacked out. The feeds weren't working, you couldn't post anything, you couldn't see anything, and it was basically any entrepreneur's nightmare.
However, with email, you know that whenever you hit send on that email for your subscribers, it's going to their inbox. There’s no question about that. Also, it's top of mind. People check their emails so many times a day, it's insane. There are 4 billion daily email users. So if you have people who actively signed up, filled out the subscribe, and they hit that button, I mean, you have instant access right there.
So I think the first thing is to just sit down and realize there are so many different campaigns you can do. But if you want to have a really strong anchor set in place for your emails, you can have all of these things automated so you don't have to constantly be writing emails every single day. A lot of them you can set up and forget about.
There is a three email campaign series that I believe every business owner should have in their marketing strategy.
The Welcome Series. It's exactly what it sounds like. It's the meet and greets of emails.
It's about three to four emails introducing yourself as a brand or a person and what you guys have to offer. It's very friendly. It's providing value and information. It's not really salesy.
Nurture series. It’s all about value.
What value can you provide them? Is it introducing them to a podcast episode that you listen to that you recommend that would meet their interest level? Giving them something. Getting on their level. You're not selling something, but you're introducing them to something cool that they probably didn't know about. It could just be an inspirational quote even, or a free download, which helps your subscriber list but also provide some value to them. There's a lot of things you could do.
Promotional campaigns. This would be the more salesy. It could also be promoting that, “hey, I'm brand new on Instagram”, or “I just made this Tik Tok account”. So, it's an invitation to your emails. There's just different ways to do it. I think those are the top three for sure.
I think nurturing your audience, and for people that sell products, that's pretty important to nurture them. You don’t want to be salesy in every email, you want to show them who you are and what you do, but you also want to tell them why they should buy from you. That nurturing sequence really helps with that, and gives them that personal touch that they may need. You never know, they might be having a bad day, and all of a sudden, they get your email, and it's that inspirational quote, and that's just what they needed today to get their day turned around.
It's building that connection and relationship with your consumer. Rather than just plastering them with “this is on sale today”, “that's on sale tomorrow”.
Instead, it's like ,“Oh, this is cool. They understand my interests. I'm going to open these emails every time.” That's always the goal. If you have a nice nurture series setup, it can be automated, it's touching base with people, it's keeping the connection, and also it’s keeping you top of mind.
Want to learn more? Check out Lia and Blair’s conversation HERE
