Businesses, no matter large or small, continually need to find ways to grow and improve. Todays digital world is constantly changing and developing, and as a business, you have to find ways to keep up. Email marketing is sometimes overlooked, as other platforms such as social media take more of a front seat. However, email marketing is one of the most essential ways of communicating with your customers, for many reasons.
Firstly, and most importantly, email marketing offers a return on investment, and is twenty times more cost effective than traditional media. In 2011, the Direct Marketing Association estimated email marketing on average returns £40 for every £1 invested. There are reduced overhead costs as you dont need lots of employees or to pay for printing, posting, phone lines or advertising rates. As well as less costs, time and energy is also reduced significantly compared to other marketing strategies. With emails you can use a template, check your copy and graphics, and send out to your database, all within a few hours. Whereas with printed post for example, you need a designer to put together what you need, plus time for printing and posting, until it reaches the consumer. That leads to another benefit of emails, where everything is done in the present, nothing needs to be sent in advance, for instance if you are having a promotion tomorrow you can send out the emails today rather than a week or two in advance.
As you attempt to grow your business, you can use email marketing to collect valuable feedback, and also to test your marketing strategies. For example, you can split your contact list in to different parts and send out different emails, perhaps with different graphics, headlines, offers or even colours, and then track which customers came back. Email marketing also increases brand awareness, users will see the emails and keep you in mind, therefore will think of you first whenever they need the service you provide.
One of the most vital benefits from email marketing, which is rare with any other marketing scheme, is that you can personalize messages to be more intimate with your clientele. Emails can be sent with users names, and you can even feed in information like purchase history. Even seperate emails can easily be created, using smaller customer lists to make it even more personal, such as seperating your contacts by city, and sending them emails specifically about their city. You can also use your database and tracking to increase sales by sending specific emails to customers that have previously bought particular items.
An added benefit of email marketing is that it can make use of impulse buying to increase sales. There are few marketing programmes that allow a customer to view an offer and purchase with a few clicks of a button. Email marketing is already a global marketing platform, and information is spread further, as it is easy to forward on emails, while it is not often where we see someone cutting out a piece from a magazine to give to a friend to who may be interested. Also, as email marketing is straightforward and quick, communications can be more frequent, although we must keep in mind that best practice is not more than 1 email a week.
Lastly, but certainly not least, is that email marketing is helping to save the planet! Using no paper, therefore saving the trees. Every small thing we do to help the planet will make a difference.
So if your business has not used email marketing yet, remember that this important, cost effective tool is able to be shared, measured and targeted, and is a huge benefit to any business.
If you want to start using email marketing White Rabit can help just fill in the contact us form in the footer of this page or call us and we will be more than happy to have a discussion about how we can start you moving forward with Email Marketing.
