Welcome to Break the blueprint – a new series of blogs exploring the unique business challenges and opportunities black business owners and entrepreneurs face. Learn how they have grown or scaled their business, researched entrepreneurial ventures within their companies or created sideline jobs, and how their stories can inspire and influence your own success.
We live in a digital age and people still check their email on a daily basis, so strong email marketing strategies are essential, especially for black-owned businesses.
When you are thinking about developing the best email marketing strategies, make sure you are authentic and tell your story to your community.
Braindump your ideas whenever you need to find a purpose and determine the expected outcome for any marketing strategy you’re working on.
The black community supports you best when you are honest so they can empathize with you.
“The most effective email marketing campaigns we’ve launched have been the ones that are authentic, tell our story, and engage our audiences. In the early days leading up to our business, all we had, our story, was about people to attract.” into our funnel, “THE MOST founder and CEO Dawn Myers told HubSpot.
Myers adds, “Be vulnerable. Show the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. Show that you identify with its weaknesses and how much you have sacrificed to serve them. This tactic creates deep credibility and trust.”
Below are five email strategies that have worked for black business owners today.
For more email marketing resources, check out these blogs that will teach you how to create a great marketing plan and create successful email marketing plans with downloadable templates.
Successful Email Marketing Strategies For Black Businesses
1. Find out what else your audience might be interested in related to your mission.
When someone subscribes to your email list, it’s safe to say that they’ve heard of your product or thinks it is interesting. Hence, it is important to dig beyond that.
Ariel Butler, founder and CEO of hair and skin products company Shea Adé, learned that when the company sends emails about sales, when it comes to product-based deals, people mostly care. It can also get daunting when emails are about the same products consumers have heard of.
“I would recommend brands find other topics to email their audiences about (blog posts, free e-books, etc.),” she said. “Anything beyond that should be emails about sales or new product releases, as opposed to emails that look like this “Hey, don’t forget to buy that full price item that I annoy you with about 4 times a week!‘”
One strategy that works for Butlers is to send affirmations to their customers on a daily basis. She started trying this simple email tactic as her brand’s mission is not only to heal the hair, but also to heal beyond the scalp.
“I want my clients to wake up every day and feel good about what they look like,” said Butler. “Since I’ve been sending these emails, I’ve been overwhelmed by how much fun my customers get from affirmations every day. Some people only got to know my brand because someone told them about our emails, and when they found out Shea Adé is a hair company, they supported me because they resonated with my brand’s mission to heal. “
2. Connect with your customers weekly.
Every week, Raven Gibson, Founder and CEO of Legendary Rootz, sends out a campaign allowing email subscribers to download a free personal digital wallpaper.
She says this is her best email marketing strategy, and she coined Wallpaper Wednesday. Over the years, Gibson’s audience has told her that while they want to support their business, they don’t have the resources to do it. She recognized this problem and came up with a free solution to keep connecting with her community.
“Usually the design focuses on celebrating black culture or an important reminder of the day,” Gibson said. “This marketing strategy has allowed our email list to grow and give us the opportunity to connect with our community.”
Gibson runs a similar campaign on Tuesdays where she connects with her followers by highlighting her love for natural hair. She sees this as a way to share the community and emphasize the importance of the black hair culture. Gibson also uses these emails to share exclusive offers and replenishments specifically for email subscribers.
These weekly email marketing campaigns have helped generate an excellent return on investment, Gibson said.
“Investing in email marketing has allowed us to realize our marketing dollars while building meaningful connections with our community,” said Gibson.
3. Start an engaging outreach campaign.
Creating outreach campaigns can get people’s attention while also providing a greater incentive than you’d expect people to just read your emails.
Alvarez Mckendall, a serial entrepreneur and digital marketing strategist, is responsible for social media and email marketing at Real Estate Bees, a technology and marketing platform for the real estate industry. One of his most successful email marketing strategies is to interview the professionals and business owners he wants to connect with.
According to Mckendall, this strategy is most effective as it helps consumers understand what the company is offering and how potential customers can benefit from it based on the lessons learned from these interviews.
Mckendall turned the previous Real Estate Bees email questionnaire into an interview-style questionnaire, customizing email templates and subject lines to express his company’s desire to interview the business owner or a key member, instead of filling out a boring questionnaire.
“Just like your friends and family members, business owners love to get attention and feel important,” Mckendall said. “Addressing your ego is an extremely effective technique for getting your attention and building a business relationship.”
When Mckendall started the outreach campaign, Real Estate Bees’ email open rate was 25-27% and the response rate was around 1%.
“I was always thinking about how we could improve it,” he said.
Based on this campaign, Real Estate Bees’ email open rate has improved to 42% and its response rate has improved by 3%. It’s important to make your campaigns engaging by including hyperlinks, photos, videos, and anything else that makes sense for your brand.
4. Ally with other companies through press partnerships.
Networking and partnership building can also be useful for email marketing strategies. Francis Perdue, CEO of PR firm Perdue Inc., suggests that black business owners band together to grow their following by promoting one another.
The free promotion introduces new products and services to different audiences and also helps build a community by connecting different consumers.
“There is no money exchanged, but it works wonders for your business,” said Perdue. “Share each other’s audience to support one another. When you create an e-blast for an event or occasion for someone in exchange, you increase your reach and show that you are committed to the community while promoting unity. “
If you don’t know where to start, pick up the phone and see what emails you already have on your contact list. When Perdue started her company over a decade ago, she said she doesn’t know many people in the industry, but she has a strong community of friends, old coworkers, and former classmates.
She made an e-blast promoting her new business and got 200 subscribers straight away. More than 2,500 people have subscribed to Perdue Inc.’s email list, all of which come from Perdue’s organic reach across their network.
“People want to support you, you’d be surprised,” she said. “Go out and network. I own a restaurant, so I know how important regular customers are.”
5. Use tools, applications, and other digital resources.
Developing email marketing strategies can be tedious and time consuming, especially if you are
publish weekly emails. It’s okay to build your campaigns yourself, but if you’re looking for something new or different, here are some tools, applications, and resources that black business owners can use to better engage with their audience:
- “That may sound crazy, but I think TikTok is an amazing way to drive customers to your brand and email list.” – servant.
- “Switching to Klaviyo for all email correspondence helped increase our abandoned cart click rate from 4% to 7%. I’m so happy I took the time to switch from Shopify and set it up . ” – Gibson.
- “We used the BuzzStream tool to send emails and monitor all analysis and statistics.” – Mckendall.
- “I love Adobe XD. It’s a prototyping application, but I use it to create all of our email marketing collateral. My favorite feature is the ability to duplicate and change the content in a split second. After creating special templates for Wallpaper Wednesday or an exclusive email sale, I can reuse them in just a few clicks. I’ve found that these templates can help me streamline the process immensely. “- Gibson.
- “Some email marketing apps cost between $ 0 and $ 100 per month. The good news is that fewer than 200 contacts are typically free. Use GoDaddy when launching your website to get coupons for marketing from their partners to cut costs as well. ”- Perdu.
- “I love the Really Good Emails website. She is a gold mine for anything to do with email. The website is very well organized and you can find almost any topic on the website. It’s almost like email marketing’s Pinterest. ”- Gibson.
