Email marketing is also stronger than ever, with 69% of businesses using it in some form to connect with prospects and customers, according to The Manifest. Small businesses are particularly well positioned to take advantage of email marketing. Here's how:Why email marketing? Small businesses need to market their brands, but they also need to be careful how they do it. With limited budgets and possibly fierce competition, any misstep can be costly, both on the marketing budget and in terms of leads that are never found and customers that are never converted. Email marketing works for small businesses because it doesn't require advanced skills or effort, is inexpensive, and complements other marketing strategies. Some of the benefits include:At low price Perhaps the most alluring benefit of email marketing for small businesses is its low cost and high return on investment (a 42-1 return on investment, according to DMA research). You're not paying a search engine or social media platform to serve targeted ads, nor are you signing a contract for a print or broadcast campaign. While these other channels can be effective and often worthy of your marketing spend, that spend is likely limited. Email marketing allows you to reach prospects and existing customers without breaking the bank. Directed Messaging Mass emails may seem impersonal, but effective email marketing differs in that you target your messages to the individual recipient. Of course, you're not writing hundreds of unique emails, but directing specific messages and campaigns to specific people based on their actions and interactions with your brand. HubSpot's research found that message personalization is the number one messaging tactic for marketers, and for good reason: with just a little work and little expense, you can send emails that recipients think be written just for them via your mailing list. Increased website traffic Email marketing encourages people to visit your website, whether it's to discover a new product, consume valuable content, make a purchase, or otherwise engage. While they're there, the chances of them continuing to engage with your brand increase. An achievable click-through rate for marketing emails is 2.5% - this may not seem like a lot, but out of the hundreds or thousands of emails sent each week, the number of website visitors and the number of page views add up quickly. Visibility This advantage is obvious: your email appearing in someone's inbox reminds that person that your brand exists. Even if the email is never opened or is immediately deleted, until the recipient unsubscribes, you are still visible to prospects and customers.
Client satisfaction Existing customers are just as important a target audience for email marketing as prospects, if not more so. Customers are already familiar with and hopefully impressed with your product; Delighting them with helpful tips, interesting content, offers for other products, and other targeted messages encourages them to Employee Email Database stay as customers and tell their friends. Email Marketing Strategies Small business email marketing should be more than just randomly sending out a message to your entire prospect/customer list. Successful campaigns should be backed by a plan, carefully crafted and timed emails, and concrete goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). These are just a few of the email marketing strategies that have proven effective for small business owners:Food campaigns Lead nurturing campaigns, sometimes also called drip campaigns, send a powerful series of scheduled emails to recipients that build on the previous message. Such campaigns can be triggered by someone downloading an e-book, making an online purchase, or simply clicking on a link in a previous email. Subsequently, prospects (and customers) receive emails containing targeted marketing based on their interactions with your brand and the last email. For example, a prospect who emailed you for more information may, after a personal response, receive an email discussing a problem similar people are having. The next email, properly timed, may include a link to a blog post outlining solutions to this problem. The following email could discuss the brand's product, and the final campaign email could include a coupon to purchase the product at a discounted price. When done right, nurture campaigns work exactly as advertised: they nurture leads into the sales funnel and, ideally, encourage recipients to look forward to the next email. Some aren't as direct as our example, and some don't go straight to a sale, but that's the versatility of the drip - it can be designed to achieve many goals for just about any prospect.
Digital Coupons People love value, and when it lands straight in their inbox, they feel especially loved. Emails with digital coupons, discount codes, and other offers can at least entice recipients to learn more about your product and even make a purchase. Plus, when a prospect or customer knows that such offers are coming to their inbox, they're more likely to open future emails, boosting your marketing efforts. Bulletins d'information Not all prospects or customers are diligent in visiting your website for the latest content, news or offers. Newsletters solve this problem by delivering this information directly to someone's inbox. More often than not, a newsletter email won't include entire articles, but just a paragraph or two of blog posts or a few sentences announcing your latest news - with links encouraging the reader to visit your website to learn more. see more. Whether a newsletter is weekly or monthly, be sure to provide consistent value: always give the recipient a reason to look forward to and open the email when it arrives.