When considering your marketing activities as a small business, there’s no doubt your strategy is guided by getting as much bang for your buck as possible. Promoting your product can be an expensive and time-consuming task, especially with a tight budget and the unique needs often associated with SME (small to medium enterprises).
Enter email marketing – an economical, effective and valuable method of brand promotion. To help you make the most of this powerful tool, I’ll walk you through the ways in which email marketing can be optimised for the best ROI (return on investment) possible:
Cost effectiveness
As anyone with a business could attest, every cent spent on marketing must be worth it. For small businesses especially, the marketing they employ should bring in more than just one benefit for it to be a worthwhile investment. Unfortunately, most small businesses do not have the time or money to run multiple concurrent campaigns across all types of mediums, so the ROI has to be strong for the marketing activities they do choose to use. This makes email marketing an attractive option, as it is highly cost-efficient. This is because there is no cost per person targeted through your emails and when it comes to customer acquisition, it’s 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined.
Customer relationship management
For small businesses, a loyal customer base is key to staying afloat as well as providing the foundation for expansion and growth. A crucial difference in the operations of a small business compared to a large organisation is the often personal and ongoing relationships fostered with their clients or customers. And with customer acquisition often as much as five times more expensive than customer retention, focusing on your pre-existing audience is the way to go if you don’t have that kind of money to play around with.
This is where email marketing can do the heavy lifting for you, as its primary goal is to incentivise your existing customers to come back and repurchase from you. Personalise your communication through techniques such as using first names, location or interest targeting to endear customers and further strengthen that one-on-one relationship you are building through your email marketing.
Adding value
What makes email marketing so powerful is that it targets leads that are already warm –the fact that they are receiving your emails means it’s more than likely they have consciously opted-in to receiving your content and thus are more inclined to make a purchase. So how do you go about this? Some topics of email marketing content include your latest product launch, an upcoming event, sales information and any updates about your business that you think your customer will enjoy reading about. However, it’s important to note that the modern consumer is increasingly sceptical and informed, so they are likely to respond to more organic approaches such as blog posts and behind the scenes footage as well.
At its core, email marketing is just another opportunity to add value every time you make contact with your audience and should complement your other social media efforts. It builds strong, loyal customers and extends the lifetime customer value by facilitating repeat purchases. A successful email campaign should have a goal, a carefully defined target audience and an impossible-to-miss call to action, so the reader knows exactly what you would like them to do.
Talia Datt, Founder & Director, The Social Cliq and Co-founder, Tapt By Hatch
