How Email Marketing Can Help Your Small Business in Great Ways?
Ever since the business world shifted to the online realm, the world of marketing followed suit. And while there are numerous forms of online marketing in this day and age, things were significantly different just a few decades ago.
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing. But that doesn’t mean that this pioneer is any less valid or effective today.
Nowadays, email marketing is still being widely used by businesses of all shapes and sizes. However, it’s important to note that the email marketing strategies used by large businesses and corporations tend to differ from those used by small businesses.
Any business that fully understands the true power of email marketing and knows how to use it right can expect numerous benefits to come their way. That being said, here are just some of how email marketing can help your small business by following a bot business model.
What is Email Marketing?
As the name suggests, email marketing is a digital marketing strategy where a business will send promotional emails to their existing and prospective customers.
This way, businesses will get the chance to reach a wide audience – virtually everyone has an email address nowadays – without necessarily having to invest too many resources.
This direct marketing tool enables businesses to reach out to and connect with their audience in both time and resource-efficient ways. This form of digital marketing is also easy to manage, which still makes it one of the top forms of marketing in the digital world.
Benefits of Email Marketing for Small Businesses
As mentioned earlier, when it comes to email marketing, small businesses most commonly use strategies that somewhat differ from the ones used by large corporations. This is not to say that either one of these is better or more effective than the other.
According to Statista, In 2019, there were 3.9 billion email subscribers worldwide, with that number predicted to rise to 4.3 billion by 2023. If you want to grow your small business then email marketing growth strategies should be adopted.
Source: Oberlo |
It’s simply worth mentioning that small businesses tend to benefit more from email marketing than large corporations. This is mostly because local customers tend to trust and relate to small businesses far faster than they do larger businesses.
Why Email Marketing?
Simply put, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to reach your target audience. And since small businesses generally don’t have too many resources at their disposal as is, this form of marketing only makes sense.
On top of that, since the investments in email marketing are quite minimal, this form of advertising offers quite a significant ROI (return on investment).
Moreover, email marketing allows you to send various types of promotions to your customers. This will potentially boost your exposure and improve loyalty with your customers, which will positively affect your bottom line.
With all this in mind, let’s see how to get started.
1. Choose an Email Provider
One of the biggest questions when it comes to email marketing is usually: how to get started?
The first step on your list should be choosing an email marketing service provider. Here, you’ll need to look into various aspects before making your choice and finding the best provider for your business.
Inspect the provider’s deliverability rate and see if it works for you.
On top of that, see if the provider offers any type of templates and email customization tools that can help you match your email promotions to your brand.
You will also need to make sure that the software offered by the provider is user-friendly and intuitive so that it eliminates a time-consuming and overly complicated learning curve.
Aside from these, you should also inquire about any additional services, like analytics and segmentation tools, as well as the customer support you can expect to rely on.
Once you find an email provider that offers all of these aspects – and you’re entirely satisfied with what you’re getting – you can move onto the next step.
2. Decide on the Strategy
The email marketing strategy – or strategies – you opt for will determine just how successful your efforts will be.
In email marketing, there are various strategies you can opt for. Personalized emails are quite popular among consumers, as the audience is generally less and less interested in generic promotions.
Subscriber segmentation is another strategy that allows you to deliver more personalized offers and target specific groups of your customers with specific offers.
On top of that, make sure you keep the mobile users in mind as well when creating your email offers.
With so many options, you won’t have any issues finding strategies that will work for your small business.
3. Nurture Your Leads
Leads play a key role in every email marketing campaign. That’s why you need to make sure that you pay special kind of attention to them.
Here, email segmentation will play a significant part, as it will allow you to divide your leads into groups based on their interest and likeliness to convert. Once you determine these groups, you can send them personalized emails to further encourage them to take the desired action.
Now, since your landing page is the end-point of your email marketing efforts, you need to make sure that it will encourage your leads further instead of causing them to bounce off. That’s why you need to make sure that your website features an impeccable design, as it will work as your online storefront.
If this is something you’re not particularly skilled at, look for local professionals to help you out. Hiring a company that specializes in web development from Huston, for instance, will enable you to connect with your local audience more easily if your business operates in this area.
4. Include a Compelling Opt-in
The whole point of your email marketing efforts is to try and attract more audiences your way. While this is not always easily achievable, you need to give your audience a reason to subscribe to your email list.
You need to create a compelling opt-in along those lines that should be free, of course. The type of opt-in you decide to go with will entirely depend on your audience and their interests and needs.
However, it’s important to note that this will require you to move a step further with your marketing efforts and find a way to boost your exposure and reach out to people who might not be aware of your business.
And that’s where blogging steps in Customers, in general, prefer businesses that are not only trying to shove their promotions down the customers’ throats but offer something of value as well. Blogging provides a great opportunity for any business to do just that.
Now, while creating compelling blog posts can sometimes be a bit time-consuming, you can easily rely on a WordPress guest blogging plugin to help you out. This way, you will potentially reach an even broader audience and – when paired with a compelling opt-in – secure a wider contacts list.
5. Send Weekly Newsletters
Customer satisfaction plays a huge role in any business, no matter its size. That’s why any business should be as honest and transparent as possible. One of the easiest ways to achieve this with email marketing is by sending weekly newsletters.
Newsletters enable you to share relevant content with your audience, which – in turn – offers great value to them. This way, you can let your subscribers know about any upcoming changes or promotions, special deals, sales, and so on.
Of course, here as well, you want to ensure that the newsletters are on point, relevant and well-optimized.
Email Marketing Has Additional Advantages.
Aside from everything mentioned previously, email marketing also has strong business-specific benefits.
While it’s extremely important to cater to your audience’s needs – as no business can thrive without customers – you need to make sure that it also makes sense business-wise.
Catering to your audience won’t be of much use to your business if it will cost you more than it’s worth – both figuratively and literally.
So, that being said, here are some of the business-specific advantages of using email marketing as a small business.
1. Great ROI
As mentioned earlier, email marketing offers a great ROI as it generally doesn’t require big investment upfront.
According to research, the expected email marketing ROI is about 122%, which is almost four times bigger than any other marketing strategy. Needless to say, this is great news for small businesses, as this form of digital marketing will significantly improve their bottom line.
2. Time and Money-efficient
To be quite frank, email marketing doesn’t require nearly as much time – or, as previously said, money – as other digital marketing efforts do.
Of course, this is not to say that you should approach these efforts as a one-and-done thing either. While you will need to stay on top of current trends and focus on any shifts in the playing field, you’ll spend significantly fewer of both of these resources on email marketing.
3. Increased Sales
In the end, the more successful you are with your email marketing efforts, the greater your sales will be.
Helping guide your audience through the sales funnel will make a huge difference in your business’s overall success, and the easiest way to start is with a well-devised email marketing campaign.
Although one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, email marketing still plays a huge role in the business world.
So, if you’re looking for a good digital marketing strategy that will help you improve your small business, look no further than email marketing.
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