How can email marketing help a new business to grow?
Business owners should first understand the options available to them in terms of email marketing. The most common options include sending out mass emails with promotional materials, publishing and distributing e-newsletters and offering correspondence courses via email. The advantage to all of these marketing strategies is the ability to reach a worldwide audience. Unlike traditional methods of marketing such as television and radio ads or print media ads which only reach an audience in a limited area anyone with access to the Internet can benefit from your email marketing techniques.
Mass emails are the most popular form of email marketing. This includes emails which are sent to hundreds, thousands or even millions of recipients at once. The problem with this type of marketing is the potential for having your emails viewed as spam. This is likely to occur if you send your emails to recipients who have no interest in your products or services and have not expressed interest in receiving emails from you.
E-newsletters are also becoming increasingly popular as a form of email marketing. E-newsletters can be a simple or as complex as you prefer and may include text, graphics, advertisements, links or any combination of these elements. One of the first decisions you will have to make is whether you wish to make your e-newsletter strictly text or include graphics in the e-newsletter. If you are on a tight budget, it may be worthwhile to only include text to avoid the need to hire a graphic artist. You may be able to incorporate graphics yourself but they won’t look nearly as professional as the graphics provided by a professional. Likewise you can certainly write your own copy for your e-newsletter but you will likely create a much better impression if you hire a qualified professional writer to create the content for you instead.
Hiring a professional graphic artist and a professional writer may seem like an extraneous expense but it is actually quite important. Your e-newsletter may be the first impression many potential customers get of you and your work so it is important to make sure everything is of the highest quality.
Correspondence courses offered via email is the final email marketing strategy we will discuss. These courses may be either offered for a fee and turn into a source of income themselves or they may be made available for free. The theory behind offering these courses for free is they often contain subtle advertising urging visitors to invest in the products and services offered by your business. Whether you charge for your email correspondences courses or offer them for free, care should be taken to ensure the information contained in these courses is completely accurate. This is critical because potential customers who receive these email courses will be judging your business based on the quality and accuracy of these email courses. If they are filled with errors the potential customer may doubt the quality of your work and seek out the products and services offered by others including your direct competitors.
Here are 10 ways email marketing can help your business grow:
1. Save valuable budget dollars
Save money and some trees! By going digital, you’ll avoid printing, paper, envelopes, mail handling, and postage costs. Plus, with an email newsletter you can work with a designer to design a custom newsletter template you can use over and over again, and get your message out much faster than good old snail mail.
2. Increase brand recognition
Get your brand image and name in front of your audience more often by including your logo, tagline, color palette, and brand graphics in the template design of your email communications. Seeing your brand elements in every issue will build brand awareness and recognition — even if they old see it for a second.
3. Connect with your target market
Email marketing helps you stay in touch with your audience on a regular basis, keeping you top of mind and at the tip of their tongue. This ensures that when your services, products, or programs are needed, they will buy from you or refer their friends, family, peers, and contacts to you.
4. Increase your credibility
Consistent, quality email marketing that is relevant, on-topic, and full of value will help you earn and grow the trust of your target market making it much easier for you to then promote and sell your products and services.
5. Educate your current clients
Your email newsletter is a great place to keep your clients up to date with what’s news in your business. By sharing what you’re working on and what’s going on, you can also keep them informed of the products, services, and programs you have available for them — and maybe entice them to hire you or buy from you again.
6. Attract new opportunities
Publishing an email newsletter can help you generate new opportunities such as strategic partnerships, joint ventures, media interviews, speaking engagements, and more. All it takes in the right person to see your message at the right time — and the opportunity may not even come from a subscriber, but from someone your ezine was forwarded to.
7. Create new streams of income
You can use your email newsletter to recommend as an affiliate, products, programs, and services you have used yourself or truly believe in and earn commissions on any sales made from your referrals. Once your list grows quite large, you can also sell ad space in your ezine.
8. Expand your network
Email marketing helps you grow your network and build your list by allowing you to capture the email address through a website opt-in box. By entering their name and email, visitors give you permission to market to them by email and make offers to them by email. Remember to promote your email newsletter via social media, on your website, when speaking, in products, and even in your email signature.
9. Organize your industry knowledge
A series of articles written for your email newsletter on one topic, can be repurposed into an ebook, whitepaper, guide, or even a free audio for content marketing. Use your email newsletter to test content topics, subject lines, headlines, and more, then turn your most popular content into an information product or opt-in gift.
10. Reach a wider audience
Drive your email newsletter subscribers back to your website by promoting recent blog posts in each issue. Repurpose your ezine content or archive your ezine articles on your blog to attract new visitors via social media. Share your ezine articles on article marketing and article sharing sites to gain exposure and visibility for your brand.
