As a business owner you will always be looking for better ways to increase your sales and market you and your business in a more effective way. The most cost-effective and profitable marketing strategy is email marketing.
Email marketing helps your business in a number of helpful ways. For example email marketing:
- Allows you to reach many people at once
- Gives you an unlimited number of contacts
- Is much more affordable than regular mail
- Is easy to update
All of these points are very important for today’s small business.
Let’s look at each of these points in more detail to see why you should implement in your business.
Email Marketing Allows You to Reach Many People at Once
When you read that statement, it is important to realise that this literally could be hundreds and thousands of real people, all of whom could be customers or potential customers.
For example, you might have a hundred email addresses to work with and email marketing will allow you to send a targeted message to all of them at once. That is the beauty of email marketing because not only can you email many people but you can email many people at once and say the same thing to them all at the same time no matter how many people are on your mailing list.
Gives You an Unlimited Number of Contacts
Email lists can be unlimited. There are many tools that will make it much easier for you to manage your list of contacts – from getting your site visitors to subscribe to your mailing list to easily sending out a newsletter or email to literally thousands of interested people.
It is More Affordable than Regular Mail
The cost of postage for regular mail is not cheap but if you are a small business it can be very expensive to send out a mailing to all of your contacts. However when you send a letter it is not just the price of a stamp- there are other costs to consider. As well as the stamp you will have to pay for paper and envelopes.
Those are just the outside costs. Mailing a letter through the posts incorporates many other costs. For example you will have to make multiple copies of the letter which you might do yourself on your printer or if there are thousands you will outsource it to a printer. All of this costs time and money.
Then you need to address the envelopes.
You can either do this by hand which would take hours or you could do it on your printer. However you would need to type and enter the address data before printing it on to special sized labels. Again, all of this takes time and money.
When you break it all down it is time consuming and expensive.
On the other hand sending an email to a modest sized list is free. It doesn’t get any better than that does it? When it comes to marketing campaigns there are not many things that are free or cost effective as email marketing.
Email marketing eliminates all of that extra wasted time and money you would have spent on sending your letter or advertisement to your clients through the post.
It is Easy to Update
One of the most difficult parts about regular mailings through the post is that your business, product or service constantly changes and evolves.
Whenever some aspect of your product or service changes it is always good to be able to notify your customers and mailing list so that they are aware of the changes.
Doing it the old way through regular mail as we discussed earlier is time consuming and expensive. However with an email list not only can you write your clients and keep them up to date on your products and services with a click of a button but you can also email them coupons and exclusive time limited offers without worrying about your fliers being outdated by the time they reach your customers through regular mail.
This particular email strategy is also extremely useful for businesses who ship their products to clients in other parts of the world where regular post would be impractical and not cost effective.
Using an Autoresponder Service to Build Your Email List
One of the easiest and most convenient ways to build and maintain a database of your subscribers is to use an autoresponder service.
There are many autoresponder services are available and they all vary in price and capability. Contact us to find out the one that we recommend for your specific business.
In most cases they are an all-in-one solution to building, maintaining and emailing your database.
In addition you can personalise your email correspondence with your subscribers details such as their first and last name as an autoresponder collects those details for you when they subscribe.
An autoresponder allows you to put attractive forms on your website so visitors can enter their details to be updated with news about your product or service, get tips, download a report and so on.
If you have a special message or offer that you want to send to your email list simply send a broadcast message and they will receive it instantly no matter where they are.
An especially useful feature of using these types of autoresponder services is that you can schedule messages to broadcast on specific days after someone subscribes to your list. This makes it a very effective sales tool.
Top Tips to Get the Best Results from Email Marketing
Email marketing can have a huge impact on your business. Here are some great tips to help you to get the best results:
Use the Split-test, click tracking and open rate features to maximise your results. Most major Autoresponders have features that allow you to see which email gets opened the most and how many clicks each post gets. You can even test two versions of the same email to see which converts best. Monitor the results of each email to get great results.
Have attention grabbing subject lines: You want your emails to be opened and read so it is important to have a captivating subject line to increase open rates. The very first thing your subscribers will see other than who sent the email is the email subject line so it needs to arouse their curiosity and engage with them in order to get them to open your email.
One autoresponder site gives this expert advice: “The best email subject lines are short, descriptive and provide the reader with a reason to explore your message further. Trying to stand out in the inbox, by using splashy or cheesy phrases, will invariably result in your email being ignored. In short….keep your subject lines simple and to the point.”
Be Consistent: The last thing you want is for your subscribers to forget who you are and why they subscribed to your list in the first place. It is a good habit to email on a consistent basis. That could be once a month or once a day. People will want to know when to expect to hear from you.
Segment your list: It is a good idea to segment your list so that you can laser target your content. You will get a much better response from subscribers who are actually interested in a specific topic. Segmenting your list helps you to send the most relevant emails to your target audience.
Use email to drive traffic to your website: Email marketing makes life so much easier and helps to convert sales. For example, you could write 1000 words and make your subscribers read a long email or you could simply tell to click on the link to view the message on your website.
The idea is to get your subscribers to visit your website. You could send them to a blog post or a page with a special offer. You want them to engage with your content so that it results in an action such as clicking the ‘Buy Button’ or giving you a call.
How Often Should Your Contact Your Subscribers?
This is the dilemma that most business owners face. When it comes to contacting your subscribers how often should you contact them? You don’t want to leave it so long that they forget about you but then you don’t want to bombard them with emails either.
So what is the right frequency that works best? The simple answer is there is no one rule that fits every business model.
It depends on your actual business and how you actually use your emails marketing.
Let’s take Groupon as an example: When you subscribe to their offers you will always get at least one email a day which will show you the latest deals.
A site like Groupon relies heavily on its email subscribers so that they keep coming back to buy more offers. In fact, as a subscriber you expect Groupon to keep you up to date of all the latest deals on a daily basis.
In other business niches your list might not appreciate you contacting them every day.
A simple tip is to let your subscribers know what to expect right from the very start when they opt in to your mailing list. If for example they are signing up for your newsletter tell them what day you publish your newsletter. You could also tell them that you will be sending them other news and updates that you think will interest them so that they know to expect other emails from you.
We Believe In Doing Things Right
Whether you need a little help getting started or just want to enhance your existing
email campaigns, we want to help you make your email marketing great.
We can help your emails to showcase your brand, company and messages to increase open rates and resulting in sale. Contact us for more information.
