Jeremy Kaplan
Running a small business is hardly a small feat.
As a self-built entrepreneur, you not only have to ensure that your products and services are unique in their own right, but that they are able to hold their own against large scale competitors.
While you can take care of this trait in the product or service that you provide, getting the information through to your target audiences through effective marketing and getting them to actually try your offered solutions is what seems to be the difficult part.
It is because you have to run the same race as the competitors who have deep pockets to support twice the marketing budget that you might have. This often leaves you wondering if there is a solution that could provide significant results without you having to spend a fortune.
That is where email marketing comes in.
Here’s How Email Marketing Can Help You Without Breaking the Bank
In the past few years, email marketing has emerged as one of the most effective marketing techniques of the digital era. With a click of a button, you are able to reach hundreds and thousands of your target audience at once, that too at the fraction of the cost of an online advertisement campaign.
This ensures that while you may not be able to challenge your competitors in terms of their budget on online advertisements, you can still run a stellar marketing campaign through other means.
However, since email marketing requires more work than a generic online banner, you need to ensure that you are putting ample thought into the process right from the start.
According to email marketing platform MyEmma.com, here’s how you can run an effective online marketing campaign by following 7 basic steps:
1. Make Your Campaign Easy to Subscribe: Ensure that you have sufficient calls-to-action (CTAs) prompts on your on-site content, your shared social media posts, and on your checkout process. Including something along the lines of “Subscribe to our newsletter” and make the data entry process easier with just a few fields. This will go a long way in ensuring that you capture your target audience’s contact information.
2. Provide an Introduction of the Type of Emails You Do: Letting people know what they are signing-up for eliminates their fear of the unknown. Telling them that you would be sending them interesting content, special offers or simply cute animal pictures might just be the way to their heart (and their inbox).
3. Offer Promotions: During the email phase, this is by far the most effective tool that a small business can employ in a marketing campaign. By ensuring to provide special offers, discounts and all around unbeatable deals, you may retain more users as long-term subscribers, that might very well translate into ROI.
4. Audience Segmentation: Knowing who you are sending the email to could be the key factor between making your email campaign a dud or a success. By ensuring that you craft the content according to your subscriber’s demographics, you can speak to them, have your content resonate with them, and essentially form a bond with them that could turn into a long-term business relationship.
5. Personalization: Apart from speaking to a whole demographic, ensure that you are crafting content according to a specific subscriber wherever possible. For instance, make use of user tracking mechanisms on your website to know about specific customer’s behavior. You can then send reminder emails to those who have a product in their shopping cart since quite a few days, or speak to those who have been checking the same service on your website repeatedly without taking any action. Furthermore, while this may seem like a simple suggestion, branding emails with subscribers’ names has been known to provide significant effects in terms of responsiveness.
6. A/B Testing: Whenever you are about to run a new email marketing campaign, ensure to do A/B testing beforehand. By making sure that you have put alternate methods of running your campaigns in place, you can compare firsthand response data and then decide between different campaigns accordingly.
7. Analysis and Optimization: Your work is not done when you send your email, but it actually gets started from there. Ensure that you leverage various analysis and optimization techniques to determine the level of response to a particular email. This would help you tweak your strategy, modify your design, and revise your content for optimal results each time you roll out an email marketing campaign.
By following the aforementioned techniques, you can rest assured in the knowledge that you are putting in all the efforts that you can to run a successful marketing campaign, which will have all the makings of becoming a successful outreach program to your target audience.
