Entrepreneurs and consumers alike will concur that businesses today have more competition than ever before.
Whether you saunter through a small town or drive through a large city, you will see businesses clutter the streets, and many of the enterprises are the same. How many coffee shops have you seen in a five-block radius?
Since businesses have to compete with other businesses, owners have to decide what are the best types of strategies to pursue.
Everything from marketing to accounting, taxes to technology, businesses, with their limited resources in today’s economy, will have to choose what the most efficient and cost-effective path is to take.
When it comes to marketing, small businesses have a wide variety of options to choose from. Despite the immense number of choices, there is one digital marketing scheme that you should think about: email marketing.
It’s true that a lot of people concede to the idea that email marketing is dead. To many marketers, email marketing has gone the way of dial-up, floppy disks and MySpace.
However, like MySpace, email marketing has gone through resurgence, a makeover if you will. And the results are proving to be lucrative: one statistic suggests email marketing, if performed correctly, can yield up to a 4,300 percent return on investment.
Image Source – By Neil Tackaberry
There are also many other benefits:
- It’s one of the most inexpensive marketing channels around.
- It targets fans and dedicated customers to your brand.
- It’s easy to create, share and track.
- It’s a global marketing initiative.
- It’s immediate so you can start noticing the results within minutes.
We’re expected to receive 140 emails per day by 2018 – small businesses have suddenly realized that email marketing is the best way to contact their customers.
Newsletters, promotional discounts, company news and other things are just some of the content you can create for your email marketing campaign.
An inbound marketing professional told Inc magazine recently: “Email marketing is better because it gets you in direct touch with your potential clients, giving you a chance to strike a chord and convince them why they should work with you…and when they’ll go happy they’d recommend your services to friends and family.”
No, email marketing isn’t dead. It’s just been ignored for so long.
Before we get into how you can leverage email marketing to improve your company’s results, you will have to remember to incorporate these tips into your strategy:
- Make a good first impression.
- Have a clear aim when starting.
- Don’t treat your customers like everyone else.
- Be recognizable and get your customers’ attention.
- Refrain from being like everyone else. Bring something new to the table.
How can your small business utilize the power of email marketing to improve your bottom line? Here are four proven strategies that can help you see colossal results:
Optimize for Mobile Devices
Add Visual Content to Emails
Integrate Social Media With Campaigns
Utilize Data Analytics
Optimize for Mobile Devices
Image Source – By Omar Jordan Fawahl
Did you know that 53 percent of all emails are opened on a mobile device? Did you also know that nearly 90 percent of brands and marketers are losing their leads because their emails aren’t optimized for mobile devices? These are both crucial figures to keep in mind.
In today’s mobile world, it’s more imperative than ever to optimize your emails for smartphones and tablets. For any email marketer the terms “lead nurturing” and “lead generating” are crucial. If you fail in this realm then you could be missing out on an increase in subscribers and, of course, more sales.
Here are a few tips to optimize your emails for mobile devices:
- Concise Content & Images: When people are on the road, they don’t have the time to read through a 1,000-word email. This is why your emails should be as clear and concise as possible when it comes to the message. During the design of your mobile-friendly email, release that a very clean, simple and focused email is very valuable on limited mobile real estate.
- Single Column Template: Again, due to the limited real estate available on smartphones, you will have to use a single column template as opposed to multi-column layouts. With a single column, your content is more flexible for all kinds of smartphones.
- Reduce & Resize Images: Although mobile downloading speeds have gone up in recent years, if the images of your email are huge than nobody is going to take the time (or data use) to download the images.Solution: reduce the sizes of your images. Also, resize the image so it can fit on mobile screens.
- Size of Links & CTAs: Ensure that all text links and call-to-action (CTA) buttons are taller and wider than the 57×57 pixel range. Also, try to separate the links far enough from one another so the recipient doesn’t accidentally click on anything.
- Subject Lines: The primary goal for any subject line is to have maximum impact, even with limited real estate. To achieve the intended target, limit your subject lines to a maximum of 15 characters. Moreover, make the first half of the subject line relevant, personal and exciting.
It’s projected that this year around 730 million email accounts will be accessed, opened and read on mobile devices. In other words, much of our email will be read, replied to and even deleted through our smartphones. This is why your email marketing campaigns must be easily viewed on smartphones, tablets and phablets.
Add Visual Content to Emails
Image Source – By Ant
We’re a visual species. We react better to visuals than text. So why are your emails 99 percent text? If that has been the case all along, or you’ve had the idea to do it, then immediately change course. Remember, our attention spans are smaller than that of a goldfish right now!
Researchers discovered that recipients were 80 percent more likely to read content if it had colored visuals. Content with relevant images gets 94 percent more views than content without relevant pictures. These are pretty compelling statistics, huh? But there’s one more type of visual content you should consider adding: video.
Many don’t realize it, but videos are rapidly being incorporated into email marketing campaigns.
The data suggest that adding videos to emails boosts monthly revenues and return on investment by 40 percent. Also, click-through rates (CTRs) go up by as much as three times when video is added to an email.
But before you start to include multiple videos to your emails, here are a few tips to mull over first:
- Keep your videos short; they shouldn’t be more than 90 seconds.
- Ensure the videos are in high-quality; we’ve gone beyond standard-definition.
- Use your best image for the thumbnail photo of the video.
- Analyze to find out if the videos are doing well or not.
Need ideas for your videos? Try out tutorials, webinars, a video of thanks, a behind the scenes look at production and previews of a new product release.
Integrate Social Media With Campaigns
Image Source – By Jason Howie
Social media is now a given when it comes to any sort of digital marketing. Whether it’s video marketing, native advertising or email marketing, social media automatically complements it.
In other words, all email marketing campaigns should be integrated with social media. It’s a lot easier than you may think. Here are a few things you can do to merge the two marketing ideas:
- Add Social Media Icons: Social media sharing and connecting icons should be added to all of your emails. Also, add engagement buttons to both your unsubscribe and your “thanks for signing up” pages.
- Add Email Opt-ins to Social Networks: Facebook tab or Twitter lead generation should both have an email opt-in page for your campaigns.
- Pitch Newsletter to Social Media: Once in a while, pitch your newsletter and email list on your social networks.
- Provide an Incentive: “What’s in it for me?” If you’re asking your subscribers to share the brand or forward emails to friends and family, you should consider adding an incentive.
- Retweet This!: It’s simple but effective. To streamline your email marketing and social media activities, highlight a specific tweet in your emails in order for readers to retweet it.
Utilize Data Analytics
Analyzing the data and metrics behind your campaigns will assist you in determining whether or not your campaign has been a success. Indeed, there are numerous data analytics programs available in the online world. However, you could perhaps save yourself a few dollars and look for key metrics yourself through free online services.
If you’re unsure what email marketing metrics & KPIs you should be tracking then here are three:
- Click-Through Rate: The percentage of email recipients who clicked on at least one link in an email.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of emails that could not be delivered to the recipient.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of subscribers who clicked on a link and completed a specific action.
Of course, the high or low rates can be attributed to a number of things, such as copywriting, deliverability, timing, spam, competition and design. There are just so many factors at play, which is why marketers tend to utilize A/B testing.
Final Thoughts
Most of us check our email daily. In a majority of cases, we have no other choice because of the line of work we’re in or we don’t want to miss out on important messages from our friends or family. Marketers get this, and small business owners are beginning to understand this.
Email marketing was thought to have been dead, but it isn’t. Some may wonder if it has been resuscitated and the answer to that is a definitive no. It’s just that email marketing has been ignored for the more sexy digital marketing trends, like social media, video and sponsored content.
With the economy the way it is today and our budgets tighter than Joan Collins at a bar, email marketing may be the best alternative conventional strategy around today.
Main Image Source – By HP Deutschland
