Are you a small business owner? Or are you worried about customer relationship management? Now, you shouldn’t. E-mail marketing is there to help you out. We often consider that for small businesses, email marketing isn’t potent enough. But the fact is, 54% of small businesses saw an upward trend in sales after considering email marketing an important tool. If you are a total newbie to email marketing, worry not; this article has a lot for you. In order to learn more and enrich yourself, check out digital marketing courses in Pune.
A Brief History of Email Marketing
Gary Thuerk was the first to send mass emails to 400 potential clients, which resulted in $13 million worth of sales of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) products. In the early 1990s, users started to refer to it as spam and started to block out the emails. Previously, it became very difficult to measure the importance of email marketing, and people never considered it a direct communication tool. But with the evolving time as small businesses saw growth because of email marketing, things got positive for email marketing. Now, this kind of marketing helps not only small businesses but pervasively all businesses.
What are the different types of email marketing?
Basically, for any business, email marketing is carried out in three potential ways:
Transactional emails: In this kind of email marketing, the company sends required emails to triggered customers. The focus is to convey information regarding password resets, confirmation emails, order status, etc. Overall, the strategy is to provide the customer with effective on-sales and after-sales assistance.
Direct emails: In this kind of email marketing, the company collects the list of potential customers and sends direct promotional emails to them. This is the cheaper and more traditional way of doing marketing. Moreover, the company should make sure that while sending email, they are not allowed to violate the spam laws (CAN-SPAM) or any other prevailing law.
Opt-in email: In this kind of email advertising, the recipient of the advertisement has subscribed to receive it. In this way, the company wants to send the newsletter to the customers. Such a newsletter informs customers of upcoming events, products, or promotions. Marketers send out promotional emails to the opted-in contacts.
Why choose e-mail marketing for a business?
There are several kinds of marketing, like content marketing, social media, search engine marketing, and many others. Why choose email marketing?
The answer lies below:
Return on Investment: We all have a perspective of a sooner outcome. If you have that, email marketing is the one for you. According to the records of DMA (direct market access), the ROI for email is $35 for every $1 spent.
Global reach
It is pretty much impossible for any other platform to provide the reach of thousands of clients instantly. We all say social media helps us spread awareness about our business and content, but there is no telling who is actually reading our content in particular. Email marketing provides businesses with an opportunity to reach out to potential clients directly by connecting over email.
Flexible sharing
Today’s world is all about email marketing because the way is easy. Customers can get all the details about our business by just subscribing to us. With us advancing digital tools tacitly, social proof has become a huge influence on online selling.
Connecting with the interested audience
This is the only kind of marketing for which consumers ask. Businesses send emails to those who have asked for it. Because of this filtration, leads were converted in a transparent way. There is one more way of sending emails to uninterested customers, but that will hamper the brand image of the company and result in the amortization of goodwill.
Minimum or no cost
Email marketing is the one where you don’t have to invest much monetary-wise. You don’t have to print posters or flyers. You can invest in some automated software for keeping track of or sending thousands of emails at a time. But for small businesses, the cost is negligible. So, the focus is on earning more and spending less.
Ways to measure the success of using email marketing for small businesses.
We all get accelerated with progress and tend to do great things. Digital marketing training in Pune provides you with all sorts of knowledge on measuring.
The small business using email marketing should keep track of a few things listed below:
- One should keep track of the number of emails that are marked as spam.
- One should keep track of the number of emails that are forwarded.
- Compare the emails that were deleted before and after opening them.
The best thing to do is to make your newsletter mobile-friendly because most of us spend a lot of time with our phones, and most of the customers use mobile devices for accessing the mail.
Follow these simple steps to build an email marketing strategy:
- Start making your list.
- Place good-quality content. Place only those commitments that you can fulfill. Like, if you promise the weekly newsletter and send it to them monthly, that is a total blunder.
- Always provide analysis and segmentation. The three important analytics are unsubscribing, click-through, and open rate.
What do you need to do to get started with email marketing?
If you have read this far, you are well aware of most of the fundamentals. Now, the next challenge is how to get started with email marketing for your business. Implementing an email marketing strategy is not too difficult. You can get started with email marketing for your business in just three easy steps:
Step 1: Get email marketing software.
Having good email marketing software will provide you with a few facilities. For your small business, you can send thousands of emails with one click, automate newsletter sending, and keep track of messages sent. One thing to keep in mind is: do not use an ISP (Internet Service Provider); they are designed for personal use only, not for email shoots. Use ESPs (Email Service Providers) instead. This is a formal platform and has the necessary infrastructure to ensure that email lands in the inbox.
Step 2: Pricing
Choose an effective price for the software packages. Many marketing agencies will convince you to get in with cheap prices for a small number of subscribers. But they will hike the price once that subscriber limit is crossed.
Step 3: Make an email list.
This is the list of subscribers who opted in to receive emails from your small business. Yes, you read it right. Clients subscribe to the emails, and that is what email contact is. They have agreed to receive the emails from your side. This process took place when they entered their email address into the email signup form or a one-to-one session form. This is done on the blog, landing pages, social media, or website. This process is technically referred to as opting-in.
Conclusion
Email marketing showed an upward graph in the 21st century, not only for businesses with great turnover but also for small businesses. One of the signs of its popularity is its low cost and formal automation. You will get to know more about email marketing in our digital marketing classes in Pune.
Also read: How to View All Emails from Windows Live Mail to Outlook.
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