There is a lot of pressure for companies of virtually any size to hop on the bandwagon and get into email marketing.
The question some of these companies end up asking themselves is “Why?”
So What Is Email Marketing
Well, email marketing is the type of thing you’ve likely been exposed to thousands of times since buying your first computer.
It’s the advertising you receive to your email inbox that comes from businesses you are connected with or from others who happened upon your address.
As for the reason companies should jump on board with this thing?
Well, in three words: Because it works.
That is of course the biggest and most important factor to consider, and there is all kinds of research out there to support the notion that it’s effective.
Firstly, every year more and more companies start taking part.
At the same time, every year the companies that have already started up email marketing campaigns decide to increase their efforts by investing more time and money into that part of their marketing efforts.
You Need To Stay Clear Of Any Spam Folders
We all have a love-hate relationship with our emails. It’s great because it’s instant, easy to use, and costs next to nothing. At the same time, most of us get hundreds, if not thousands of emails a month—leaving a majority of them unread. As a business reaching out to customers through email, how can you keep your message from getting ignored or worse, moved to the spam folder?
Here are five email marketing secrets every small business needs to know.
Play by the rules
Before starting any email campaign, it’s important to know the rights of your subscribers. Under Australia’s Spam Act 2003, there are three requirements to avoid being classified as spam: consent, identification, and unsubscribe facilities.
Your subscribers should deliberately sign-up to your email list, or have an existing relationship with your business. Each email you send out must also clearly identify your business as the sender and include your full contact details. Lastly, an unsubscribe feature must be built into the email to make it easy for users to opt out of receiving your messages.
Choose quality over quantity
Don’t buy an email list, believe me–it’s not worth it! Instead of aiming for a large number of subscribers from the start, it’s better to target the right people who have higher chances of converting. The key here is aiming for lower UN-subscribe rates. Article Source – Dynamic Business
Email Marketing Allows You To Track All Campaigns
Another way to prove that it works is by looking at the actual numbers the campaigns deliver. Unlike traditional advertising methods, email marketing campaigns allow business to see exactly how effective their emails have been.
While they can’t get exact measurements of the long-term result of putting their brand or product back into the minds of their recipients, they can see the short-term results which are the ones that involve the immediate sales.
Companies can do this by logging into their marketing software and literally see the exact number of people who viewed their message and then the percentage of those people who followed through by clicking a link on the advertisement. The statistics go far deeper than that as well, including things like how many sales resulted from each click.
Those numbers, aside from showing a company that their email marketing efforts are paying off, can do a lot more things as well. These other things are those that make this form of marketing even more appealing and gives more reasons for other companies to take up the practice.
The beauty of seeing those numbers so quickly, easily, and clearly, as well as being able to trust their accuracy, means that companies can tweak their ads regularly to see which technique works best.
You Can Easily Target Different Demographics
Another reason why any business should consider email marketing is the fact that it allows easy targeting of their desired demographic. A good example of how this works is to look at online bookstores and how they regularly ask their customers to sign up for weekly newsletters. They know that everyone who signs up is a legitimate lead.
Another example is when a company places an ad to another company’s correspondence.
For instance, anyone after the bookstore’s demographic can pay to attach their message to the bookstore’s newsletter.
Email Marketing Is Affordable Even For Small Business
Lastly, the best reason to get into email marketing is that it’s cheap. It’s among the most inexpensive forms of marketing and can be started up by sending only a few emails at first. That right there is probably the biggest driving force behind the marketing phenomenon.
