Why Should You Take Email Marketing Seriously?

Why are you in business? To earn revenue and increase sales year after year. Statistics say an average person will need to hear about you at least five times before he/she plans to actually buy your service or products. Here’s how email marketing can help you. You can send newsletters to your subscribers so that they get a first-hand knowledge about you. Whether it is an important sales decision or a change in company policy, shoot an email to your target audience and half the battle is won! This does not require much time or money. All you need is some elbow grease to include email marketing into your content strategy. Modcloth practices this so warmly that their emails never bug their customers, instead adding a sense of belongingness.

How about dealing with the same customer for years and eventually winning his/her referrals in the process? After a while you will see that customer retention and new referrals are achievable. With email marketing your job becomes easier. Use the right platform and analyze subscribers’ reactions with actionable reports. I personally like ExpressPigeon for their professional templates, good analytics and time saving tools. Zipcar used it effectively to build and enhance the bond between the organization and its public. Whenever the customer is busy and avoids Zipcar it sends out a ‘Miss you’ email to keep communications flowing. Modcloth on the other hand spreads its Referral program via email marketing.

When you use email marketing to target your subscribers, the ROI is very high. According to the Direct Marketing Association, commercial email marketing produced higher ROI in 2011 than any other marketing channel—an astounding $40.56 in return for every $1 spent! That is a whopping 4000%. You can see how profitable it is. When British Airways wanted to promote its Executive Club Mobile app, it took help of email marketing. The success results were mind-blowing: the campaign generated 250,000 downloads, more than double the targeted number, and clicks were as high as 70,000.

As you are a startup, spending huge amount on marketing your product and services will be hard bait. So why not try email marketing? You need neither a huge marketing team nor reams of technical knowledge to bring out successful marketing campaigns. All you do is jazz up an email campaign using templates of your choice, insert some cool text and captivating pictures and videos, logos and phew you’re done!

Once your email reaches the mail boxes of your subscribers, it just takes a click to get it forwarded among their friends and family to utilize your brilliant products and services. There isn’t any other marketing tool that is so easy to create and share. Before you realize, your subscribers will be your brand evangelists and give your business a notch up higher.

Use surveys combined with email marketing to get feedback from your audience. Always value and follow up on feedback, since any business is a two way street. What UncommonGoods does is it shares its collected feedback inside a newsletter and allows customers to sell their stuff. A lovely way of accepting feedback, utilizing it to the hilt and promoting it the right way!

Although it may look very trivial yet we are all striving to make our planet healthy and lively everyday, enhancing the green power. When you optimize email marketing as your business to business or direct to customer marketing method, you are eventually reducing the number of trees killed for printing marketing pieces. Be a conscious entrepreneur and do your bit to save the planet for future generations to enjoy. Philips did a green marketing initiative to showcase they are a caring company.

The bottom line is that email marketing is an effective and inexpensive weapon in the arsenal of your business tools. Use it to your advantage and enjoy the benefits.