If you’re in the tattoo industry, whether as a shop owner or individual artist, building valuable relationships with your clients and potential clientele can make all of the difference for your brand name. An unobtrusive way to maintain connections with your client list is through email.
Unlike social media, where your followers don't always see your content and updates right away, email allows you to contact your clients directly because they’ve given you permission to share relevant information with them. People like to be updated on and reminded of things that they like, which is how they ended up on your mailing list in the first place, so using that to your advantage is key. Whether they are previous or new clients, emails allow you to update them on your business— appointment openings, promotions, special events, and more to build a community around your work.
In our previous blog post, three options were offered for free email marketing campaign creation and management that would be easy and worthwhile for tattoo artists and business owners to start a basic email marketing strategy with.
MailChimp
- User friendly design
- Email automation
- Landing page platform
- e-Commerce integration
- Retargeting ads
- Reporting tools
- Subscriber limit: 2k
- Emails Per Month: 10k
SendinBlue
- Customizable designs
- Email campaigns
- Transaction emails
- SMS text messages
- Integrated CRM
- Retargeting ads
- Subscriber limit: Unlimited
- Emails Per Month: 9k
Zoho
- Simple to use
- Customizable designs
- Email report analysis tools
- Subscriber limit: 2k
- Emails Per Month: 12k
Each site provides close to 10k emails per month and ranging from 2k to infinite subscribers, which would support small businesses with ease. Of the three options, MailChimp is the most popular option, as it is dubbed the “best all in one marketing automation” site, compared to SendinBlue which is known for its bulk email services for beginners. Your preference may depend on how tech savvy you are, how artistic and unique you want to be with your email designs, or how you’d like to track your email strategy progress. In this case, we’ve gone to check out MailChimp user interface and inner workings to help you take advantage of it for your tattoo business.
By the end of this article, you will know how to use MailChimp to:
- Create a new business account
- Input leads into the MailChimp CRM system
- Gather more leads using signup forms and offered content
- Group and segment your leads into more personalized email lists
Create Your MailChimp Account
When you provide your email address to make an account, the site sends a verification link. Once verified, they ask for your information like business title and address, whether or not you have an email list already, questions about your business such as in-person and e-commerce services you offer or how you measure success.
The site then walks you through designing, adding contacts to, and sending your first campaign. On your home page you will see the overview and activity of your audience and campaigns.
There are tips to help you to do things like:
- Ask website visitors to join your mailing list with a well-designed pop-up form
- Design a landing page to collect email addresses, promote an event, or announce a pre-sale
- Recapture people who leave your site, wherever they go online, with Google remarketing ads
Input & Gather Leads For Your Mailing List
If you click the “Audience” tab in the navigation bar at the top left, you’ll see your audience insights.
To the left of your audience status, you view your contacts or manage your audience, which is where we begin our mailing list. I will be speaking to each selection in the drop down menu, pausing to show you how to create a signup form along the way.
You get the option manually type in contact information to create your mailing list, depending on how many clients you have information for.
Another option is to import a current list of contacts into the system automatically.
If you have fewer clients or would like to accumulate more email addresses before segmenting and sending out an email campaign, MailChimp allows you to create Signup Forms— essentially landing pages that are linked to your email, website, or social media. As mentioned in our blog on email marketing strategy for your tattoo business, the most effective way to gather email addresses legitimately is to create an offering and give it to your online following in return for their contact information. This ensures that you are targeting clients who value and appreciate your work, and are likely to become potential clients or future referrals.
Creating a Signup Form in Mailchimp is as simple or complicated as you choose. They allow you to select a basic template, drag and drop modules for customized design, and input your photos to create your signature look. It then provides a page title and URL to link, with an automatic email message when anyone signs up on your form! From here, the best thing to do is to distribute your free content and signup form everywhere you market yourself— this includes website, social media, and in person.
Group and Segment Your Mailing List
Once you have a list of email addresses, you can manage and break your list down into groups and segments, to personalize your clients’ experience with you and your brand. By grouping and segmenting your contacts into smaller lists based on their interests or state of business with you, you can easily ensure that they have an individualized experience rather than a generic one.
Say you own a shop that offers tattoos and piercings, with various promotions and specials offered. Would you send piercing promotions to customers who historically only visited to receive tattoos? Or visa versa, sending tattoo promotions to clients who had only ever visited to get piercings? The client interest doesn’t align with your offering, so it is unlikely that they would partake in the promotion and may even feel that your brand is marketing to them in a generic way, rather than building a personal relationship. This is why it is important to utilize the free grouping and segmenting tools in MailChimp to create smaller, more personalized email lists.
Groups let you categorize your contacts by interest or preference. This could be helpful in the case that you own a shop that does a combination of tattoo and piercing, for example, to group various clients accordingly.
Segments, on the other hand, allow you to target email subscribers by their location, engagement, activity level, and combinations of details. These lists could be used set apart your veteran customers from new ones for various promotions, separate piercing and tattoo clients, or advertise new business information to all of your fan base. The possibilities are tantamount when you can customize your lists to match your brand’s needs.
Now that you have some insight as to how to navigate MailChimp, take your imagination and run. Create signup forms to capture emails, introduce your free content to the world and watch your mailing list come to fruition. Then take that list and break it down into a bunch of segments and groups based on your clients’ specific needs and interests. This is how you can form and maintain real but unobtrusive connections with interested clients. If you don’t have any idea what you’re doing, check out my post to help guide you through the process of creating an email marketing strategy.