In Part I of our series about promoting your website, we discussed the importance of SEO.  In part II, we looked at branding. And in Part III we looked at how to use Social Media to promote your website. Today, we are putting email up to the task of website promotion and will be sharing how email done right can work both alongside and for your small business website.

Ways to use email to promote your website range from simple to elaborate – and each will be effective in their own way. First, for your business email, have a signature built in that has a link to your website. Each time you contact a customer, they’ll see your name and contact information including your website link and this will give them one more way to get to know your business better through your website.

In addition, you can take the larger step of creating an email newsletter. An email newsletter will include all of your clients’ email addresses and you can reach out to them in a personal yet professional way to lead them to your website to create more business. MailChimp and Constant Contact are both well suited for creating and sending email newsletters.
Your newsletter can feed your customers information about what your business is about, what’s new, and attract them to your website to seal the deal.

Some important things to consider when crafting an email or newsletter to subscribers:
  1. Make sure it’s mobile friendly – you want to keep the customer engaged and to do this, both your email and your website should display well on mobile devices. They will delete the email, maybe even unsubscribe and if they get as far as clicking on your website from the email and your website isn’t mobile friendly, they won’t stay long. MailChimp now offers mobile friendly options in their templates.
  2. Find a good information balance – you want to share information – drive traffic to your website and build sales. With too much information and too many choices, customers won’t choose anything. They will be too overwhelmed to act at all and your email will be deleted.
  3. Target the right thing to the right customer – The ability to reach potential customers in so many ways is enticing. Knowing who is reading your Facebook posts and how they respond to them, or who visits your website and what they do there are important – and so is knowing who is receiving your email: You can’t predict all of these things, but consistency is key. If you are selling your 9-5 Monday through Friday business, don’t send your email on Saturday when you can’t be reached.