This is a guest blog written by Christopher Jan Benitez, a freelance writer specializing in digital marketing.
Managing a coworking space can be a challenging task, with many responsibilities to juggle. A critical aspect of running a coworking business is effectively reaching out to prospective members and promoting your space.
Coworking space owners and operators can achieve this by creating an effective email marketing strategy to help them build a vibrant community.
However, this strategy presents a new challenge: developing a successful email marketing strategy, while vital, is not easy. Having unclear goals will cause your marketing efforts to go to waste, leading to missed growth opportunities for your coworking space.
In this article, we explore the best practices for email marketing for coworking spaces. By following these practices, you can create a strategy that helps you promote and generate more interest and engagement from prospective members.
The first thing you must do is build your email marketing list and find ways to gather your leads’ email addresses.
One way of doing this is by designing a pop-up on your website asking visitors to book a tour. In doing so, they must enter their email address for to reach out to them.
Another way to build your email list is to create an e-book on a topic relevant to your target market – for example, an ebook on how to grow your freelance business if your target is freelancer workers. People can get a free copy of the e-book, but only if they sign up for your email list.
Of course, your work doesn’t stop after you’ve built your initial email list. You now have to continue to build your list and find new, creative ways of reaching your prospective users, in addition to starting to drive value through building targeted email marketing campaigns.
Once you’ve built your list of initial email subscribers, you’re ready to kick off your email marketing strategy development. Don’t worry if your list isn’t large yet – even a list as low as 100 subscribers can help you yield positive results. What’s more important is getting your subscribers to engage with your emails.
You must start by defining the goal and objective of your email list. By having both, you can proceed with crafting a campaign that will help you achieve your goal and objective.
One framework you can adopt for your goal setting is the S.M.A.R.T. framework. Here’s an example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal for your coworking space:
This is just an example of how you could approach developing your goal using this framework. The idea is to give your coworking space a concrete plan for executing the strategy. Once it concludes, you can review and analyze the results to determine how to improve your strategy. This is something we’ll also discuss in a later section of this article.
Sending emails is usually done internally to improve team members’ communication and productivity. However, the same concept applies to turning your leads into customers.
By sending them emails, you build trust and rapport moving forward.
Your efforts to keep in touch with leads will help you make a convincing case for them to become members of your coworking space!
To do this, you must write emails they want to click on and read.
This process begins by writing compelling subject lines for all your emails. The goal is always to want them to click on your email so they read its content.
Make your subject lines short, avoid words, which might be marked as spam by default, such as “free,” “money,” etc., and ask open-ended questions to get the subscribers’ attention.
When writing the email itself, you need to take a personal approach. That means knowing your audience’s demographics and psychographics. This knowledge allows you to address their pain points, wants, and needs.
Finally, there needs to be a clear purpose for all your emails. Communicate the benefits your subscribers receive.
Having a clear call to action (CTA) at the end of every email should mobilize them to act upon it. This CTA must align with a S.M.A.R.T. goal you want to achieve for your coworking space. Some examples are “Book a Tour”, “Take a peek” (linking to a landing page on your website), and “Learn More” (linking to a blog you published).
You can send emails using your native email app, however. If you’re sending emails via Mac Mail, you’re not leveraging all of the capabilities and tools of a Mac Mail alternative.
According to recent research, segmented emails are responsible for 36% of generating email revenue. But what are segmented emails?
These are emails sent to specific groups or subgroups of your email list. For example, people who signed up to your list because they want a tour of your coworking space to have different goals and objectives than those who signed up at a paint night event that you hosted for creative professionals in your city. Because of their potentially different needs (i.e., one is interested in coworking and the other is interested in paint nights), they may not be interested in the same topics and therefore may not engage with specific topics in the same way.
In this case, you may create a separate campaign for people who attended a tour. You could send emails every time you launch a promo to become a member of your coworking space. Since they’ve shown interest in your coworking space, sending them emails that showcase the benefits of joining your coworking space should yield higher conversion rates.
On the other hand, subscribers who signed up at the paint night event may be more interested in future events and keeping up to date on your events calendar.
Ultimately, the goal is to manage your contacts by grouping them into their appropriate segment. From here, you can send each segment personalized emails, thus helping you build a more engaged email list.
An email marketing strategy should constantly be adjusted to the data you gather and analyze whenever a campaign concludes.
You can’t stick to the same email strategy if it doesn’t produce the results you need to grow engagement and your membership base.
Therefore, analyzing your email metrics is an essential skill on your way to email marketing success.
Open and click rates are two of the most vital metrics for every email campaign. Open rates refer to the percentage of subscribers who clicked on your email in their inbox. Click rates are the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in your email. Using both metrics, you can identify which aspects of your campaign worked and which didn’t.
For instance, you can implement subject line formats that generate high open rates across your other emails.
Lastly, most email platforms also have an A/B testing feature where you can send different versions of your email to a segment in your list.
The goal is to identify which variant generated the most clicks or conversions. The version that produced the highest results will be the one to be used for the remainder of the campaign.
Email marketing is a powerful tool for coworking space owners and operators looking to build a strong community and promote their space.
By following the best practices outlined in this article, you can create an effective email marketing strategy that helps you reach potential members and help convert them into paying members of your thriving community.
Christopher Jan Benitez is a freelance writer for hire specializing in digital marketing. His work has been published on SEO and affiliate marketing-specific niches like Monitor Backlinks, Niche Pursuits, DFY Links, Web Hosting Secret Revealed, and others. As an online writer for 13 years and counting, he continues to provide his writing services and SEO expertise to organizations and clients worldwide. Outside his writing ventures, he enjoys heavy metal music and plays terrible guitar.
