Email marketing is popping up in business conversations everywhere. And with good reason. Keeping in touch with your existing and potential clients is an important part of generating leads and marketing a small business. However it can be time consuming and expensive to reach everyone regularly.
As business owners, we are all busy being pulled in a hundred directions at once, so the regular keeping in touch and lead nurturing can fall through the cracks. Not giving this part of your business regular attention can result in an up and down cycle – take time out of the core business to generate leads, then put the lead generation aside to work on the business while the leads drop off. Not only is it a frustrating way to work, it’s inefficient.
Email Marketing is Effective
The good news is email marketing can smooth out the bumps. 73% of Australian marketers rated email newsletters as an effective marketing tactic, compared to 66% for in person events (ref: ADMA http://www.adma.com.au/). Put that statistic together with the low cost of email marketing and it becomes a very attractive option. As part of your marketing strategy, email marketing campaigns can be set up to do much of hard work without you having to sacrifice time from your core role.
Email Marketing is Efficient
Email marketing is a form of marketing automation. It is the sending marketing communications to prospects and existing customers via email, much the same as direct mail only easier. It can take the form of regular email newsletters, blog posts send by email, autoresponder series that nurture a prospect or special offers for regular customers.
An email newsletter, for example, is a fantastic option for communicating with your market. Web applications make creating and sending email newsletters a flexible choice. Apps offer template layouts for your newsletters, they can pull content or extracts from your blog posts and can include links to your website and social media accounts. What’s more, web applications such as MailChimp are free or low cost.
Like any sort of marketing, email marketing needs a strategy behind it. However, because it’s possible to have a number of campaigns, it’s possible to work towards a number of goals. You might set up one campaign per major product category as a lead nurturing tool, another to keep in touch with customers who haven’t purchased in a little while and another to send rewards to regular customers.
Email Marketing is Permission Based
Email marketing is permission based marketing. That means the recipients of your email marketing have (or should have) agreed to receive electronic communications from you, perhaps via a form on your website or a checkbox on your service contract. They have already shown an interest in what you have to offer. Your message is delivered straight to their inbox, where they can read it at their leisure, no interruptions required.
Email marketing is an ideal way of building loyalty and trust, keeping customers informed and generating repeat business. As a time and cost effective marketing tool, it’s something that you should seriously investigate for your business.
What’s Stopping You?
Have you thought about implementing an email marketing system? What are your top questions about email marketing?
