Email marketing for small business

Every penny spent on marketing must be money well spent.

Email marketing is an efficient way to ensure that small businesses can reach out to their customers, grow their customer base, and build their reputation. It is flexible, reliable and continues to be a channel that brags considerable ROI.

Moreover, there’s a reason your inbox is always busy: e-mail marketing just works. Just look at some of the stats:

• Email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel, including search and social. – Monetate

• 72% people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media. – MarketingSherpa

• Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. – McKinsey

• The average order value of an email is at least three times higher than that of social media. – McKinsey

• 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email. – Adobe

• A message is 5x more likely to be seen in email than via Facebook. – Radicati

But companies can get smarter about ensuring every message counts.

Focus on the journey not just the message

Marketers dedicate a lot of time to every aspect of the email, design, subject line and content – but the email is often only the first step in the process. It is part of a series of interactions with your brand. A conversation starter.

Customised landing pages and targeted web pages can significantly increase conversion rates. Understanding your web traffic with tools like in-leads™ is critical to get your lead generation and prospect management processes running like a well-oiled machine, and email is a key part of this process.

Beyond the click tracking, takes your email marketing programme from a communication machine to a lead generation hub. Enabling you to prioritise your hottest leads, by understanding who is the most viable and what they are most interested in. So you can avoid wasting time and effort on leads that just aren’t ready yet.

Personalisation

By adding personalisation to your emails you have more chance of cutting through the rest of the noise of the inbox. Personalised email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. – Aberdeen.  Email remains one of the most effective direct ways to get your message across and build your brand with your audience.  And with the impact of GDPR on your data lists your interactions are set only to be more meaningful.

Your opted-in audience is already, in-part, bought in to your brand. You job now is to build their engagement and not lose them. A very different discipline to trying to capture a new lead from the outset with someone who knows nothing of who you are or what you do.

And personalisation can be so much more than simply dropping a first name or company name into the content of the message. With Advanced Dynamic Content you can tailor blocks of your emails to different segments. Whether you choose to simply include a sign off from the most appropriate contact in your business, to including an industry specific case study or quote relevant to their sector. There are many exciting ways that dynamic content can increase engagement, without increasing effort.

Automation

With automation you can extend your marketing team without increasing your headcount. By putting together basic workflows you can build engagement with your customers and educate them. By triggering your emails at particular points in the buyers journey you can be sure that you contact is getting the right information at the right time. Welcome campaigns, abandon basket and renewal reminders can all engage your customers and significantly boost your bottom line.

Integration

If you can integrate your email platform with your CRM, either directly or via an intermediary like Zapier, you can work with a single customer view.  Keep your contact management in one place, where it is simple to update and maintain. Removing duplications of data keeps you in control of your database and ensures that your list health remains optimum.

Your email marketing database is like a plant. It needs to be continually fed, watered and pruned if it is to stay in good health, yet some businesses still take the approach of weeding out whatever contact data they hold and blasting an email out to all and sundry in the hope of getting a few extra enquiries. You have to change from these sorts of practices to be an effective email marketer today. Read more about maintaining your email marketing database.

Deliverability

You wouldn’t accept it if members of your team were only running at 60% capacity, so why accept it of your email marketing. If your deliverability isn’t optimised this could be exactly what you are doing. There are both technical and content related reasons why your mails may not be reaching all of your audience, but it takes a trained eye to be able to see what needs to be corrected to improve your success.  If you are not sure where to start, we can help.  We can offer a free email marketing healthcheck where we will check the main elements of your campaign and offer advice and best practice tips to help improve your deliverability. Find out more here.

If you think email is passed its prime then you need to take another look. Email is the cornerstone to an effective communication campaign and integral to a successful lead generation campaign. Whatever the size of your business or the size of your team there are substantial ways that email can work for you and with help and support from the experts you could open doors you have not seen before.