What marketing tool returns an average of $36 for every $1 you spend?
It’s email marketing. The first email campaign was rolled out in 1998. This form of marketing remains effective and relevant today, despite the proliferation of billions of websites and the massive advent of social media sites.
So often, what works well on the internet
today tends to be rendered obsolete a year later. But email marketing has
bucked the cyber-obsolescence trend for specific, identifiable reasons. That
includes the fact that they make it easy to target pre-qualified markets and
can be personalized to the interest of the email recipient.
Furthermore, automation garners deep customer
insights, enabling the user to keep a target audience engaged with a brand.
For these reasons and more, email marketing is
tailor-made for small businesses, most of which are seeking to scale up their
operations on limited budgets.
Here are some tips for small businesses that
want to implement powerful email marketing campaigns:
1. Select an email marketing
service provider
Never try to reinvent the wheel. The best
practice is to work with an experienced provider. That way, a small business
can jump right in and start leveraging email marketing automation for sending
messages to large groups in a well-defined target market.
By working with an established service, the
user taps into email templates, tools for managing and growing lists and
tracking results. Insight tools allow users to engage dynamically with
recipients. That, in turn, helps fine-tune campaigns and message content.
2. Build Contact Lists
Even a small start-up business will likely
have some existing contacts for starting an email list. However, it will soon
be imperative to go further by doing things like using sign-up sheets, adding a
sign-up form to your website and working your social media following to
subscribe to your list.
Important note: Don’t fall for purchasing
email lists! They almost never deliver strong responsive returns. The customers
you garner organically and directly with your efforts are slow to build, but
the quality of these contacts tends to be excellent. Thus, work intensively on
building a personal “house list” that’s specific to your business.
3. Leverage the Power of Email Software
An
email marketing software for small businesses will help you set up
automated marketing messaging that’s based on events-driven data. The insights
gleaned from such data are invaluable because it allows a high degree of
customization that personalizes messages for each prospect on your email list.
That helps to convert “cold prospects” into “paying customers.”
This includes time-based marketing campaigns
that key on things like birthdays, sign-up anniversaries, annual
gifts/donations, time since the last purchase and much more.
4. Set Up a Welcome Email
This is the first message that a new
subscriber will get from your email campaign. A welcome email is critical
because they constitute that all-important first impression of a small
business. Studies show that welcome email messages enjoy a higher-than-average
opening rate. That demonstrates the value of delivering a powerful,
interest-grabbing message in this first contact with a prospect.
Provide something useful right away. Also, use
the welcome email to provide a concise overview of the benefits of your company
and then offer the email reader something they can use right away. Email
software will enable small businesses to send to new contacts automatically.
5. Craft a Reusable Email
Template
A reusable email template is a graphic for
branding your company logo, color scheme and other key identifiers. It contains
links to send viewers to your website, social media sites and other locations.
Once created, a reusable email template frees
you from needing to start from scratch every time. Your ready-to-use branding
package is always at the ready.
Building a template is easy because many
providers offer pre-designed templates you can plug into and customize to
capture the specific look and message of a small business.
6. Test, Test, Test
It’s easy for email marketing newbies to
stumble out of the gate. That can mean bonehead moves like forgetting a key
link or a spelling error right up on the subject line! That’s why test-sending
the message is highly advised to make sure the kinks are worked out of your
email marketing message before it's ready for prime time.
Don’t be intimidated by the idea of setting up
an email marketing campaign. Remember, this is one of the most defined
marketing methods known to cyberspace.
That's because there are so many existing examples of other successful campaigns, competent providers and excellent software packages to help you get the job done.
Email marketing provides the massive opportunity for ROI, without a lot of upfront costs.
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