Is email marketing good for small businesses?
When Email Marketing Does Not Work
Whether you are already involved in an email marketing campaign or are simply considering the possibility of launching an email marketing campaign it is important to note that email marketing does not always work. This means that sometimes despite your best efforts, or sometimes in spite of your best efforts, you email marketing campaign will either not generate the degree of success you anticipated or may not generate any success at all. This failure to generate success may be do to a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons may be a lack of interest on behalf of your target audience, failure to properly execute your email marketing strategy or poor planning in your strategy. This article will take a look at some situations in which email marketing is not effective and will offer some advice for dealing with these situations.
First we will consider why a lack of interest from target audience members can result in a failed email marketing campaign. Before investing time, energy and money into an email marketing campaign, it is worthwhile to hire a consultant to conduct market research. This research should provide valuable feedback such as demographics for the target audience and information on the probability these target audience members will be responsive to email marketing. This last piece of information in particular should help the business owner to determine whether or not to pursue email marketing as an advertising option. If market research indicates the members of your target audience are not likely to purchase the products or services you offer online or even use the Internet to research these products or services; investing in an email marketing campaign is not worthwhile. You may enjoy a small degree of success from this marketing effort but it is not likely to significant enough to warrant the time and effort required to achieve this small degree of success.
"Signing up is a powerful signal of intent to buy. Send them emails until they do." - Jordie van Rijn
Another aspect of email marketing which can cause your marketing campaign to result in failure is the inability to properly execute your marketing plan. This is important because even the most well formulated marketing strategy can flounder if you are not able to properly execute these steps. For example, you may plan to use e-newsletters as a critical component of your email marketing campaign but if these e-newsletters do not appear to be professionally designed and written, frequently arrive late and do not offer valuable information, readers are not likely to invest in your products or services based on these e-newsletters. In each aspect of your email marketing campaign, you should strive to ensure the information you provide to your email recipients is informative, accurate and interesting. This type of copy is more likely to pique the interest of the readers.
"Personalization – it is not about first/last name. It’s about relevant content." - Dan Jak
Finally, poor planning can cause an email marketing campaign to falter. For example, if you were to issue a component of your email marketing campaign hoping to generate a huge interest in your products and receive a great deal of interest, you should be prepared to be able to sell your products. Not having enough stock on hand after you undergo a marketing effort can be a critical mistake because potential customers may lose interest if they have to wait for the products. This is just one example of poor planning causing problems but poor planning can cause a host of different problems including potential customers losing interesting, the creation of confusion regarding your products and services and even potential customers being angered by your email marketing.
How Your Business Can Benefit from Email Marketing
"Done is better than perfect." - Facebook
Even if you are already running a successful business, you may be surprised to learn your business can benefit greatly from orchestrating an effective email marketing campaign. An email marketing campaign and a number of different advantages including the ability to reach a worldwide audience, a variety of different marketing options at your fingertips and the ability to do a great deal of marketing with very little investment dollars. This article will take a look at all of these different topics to provide insight into how email marketing can benefit your business.
For many business owners one of the most prominent advantages to email marketing is the ability to reach a worldwide audience with minimal effort. While traditional marketing methods such as television advertisements, radio advertisements and advertisements in print media are typically targeted at a rather small geographic area, email marketing can reach a worldwide audience. It is possible to reach an audience of this magnitude with other marketing methods but it would be much more complicated to do and would likely involve launching advertising campaigns in several different markets. This is possible but would require an intense coordination effort and will likely require at least a few staff members to assist you in this effort.
Conversely, the ability to transmit instantly via email can make it much easier to reach target audience members with literally just the click of a mouse. The act of creating the marketing materials for your email marketing campaign is significantly more involved but once this is done reaching members of your target audience is quite simple.
"People need stories more than bread itself. They tell us how to live, and why." - Arabian Nights
Another advantage to email marketing is there are a multitude of advertising options available to those who wish to utilize this marketing strategy. The most commonly used method of email marketing it so send out group emails with product information and other promotional materials. However, another way to approach the concept of email marketing is to publish and distribute e-newsletters to interested email recipients. An e-newsletter is typically much more in depth than the type of information which would normally accompany a promotional email. These e-newsletters typically feature at least one in depth article as well as a few shorter articles which either offer useful tips or review products. Additionally there may be some graphics, advertising and links include in the layout of the e-newsletter. Email marketing campaigns can also take the place of email correspondence courses which typically focus on one niche subject and feature a few installments which provide detailed information on a specific facet of the niche subject.
"Start testing and stop arguing." - Jon Correll
Finally email marketing can benefit your business because it is an extremely cost effective method of advertising. When you opt to orchestrate an email marketing campaign you will likely invest money in hiring professionals such as writers and graphic designers to assist you in creating content and an appealing layout for your promotional emails. However, this is typically not more than you would invest in hiring the same type of personnel for an offline marketing campaign. However, unlike offline marketing methods there is not a great deal of cost associated with executing your email marketing campaign. Consider the creation of a television commercial where you will have to pay fees and purchase advertising space to allow your advertising to reach the public. However, when you transmit your advertising via email, there is virtually no cost associated with this transmission. There are of course costs associated with maintaining an Internet connection and retaining employees to send these emails but these costs are minimal and can be considered to be part of normal operating costs.
What people said about Email Marketing using Active Campaign
It’s not about more opens and clicks, it’s about more customers and sales. You aren’t evaluating ActiveCampaign because you want to make “vanity metrics” look good. It comes down to what ActiveCampaign can do for your business. ActiveCampaign is ranked #1 by G2 in Marketing Automation and ranked #1 by TrustRadius in Email Marketing because we help you attract more customers, keep more customers, and grow your revenue.
Shaping your customer experience isn’t just a marketing thing, a sales thing or a support thing — it’s an everyone thing. You need a platform that enables all the functions in your organization to collaborate, with a single holistic view of the customer. ActiveCampaign is the first and leading Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform, spanning email marketing automation, sales automation, CRM and support tools, with the ability to easily connect with other applications your team uses. Don’t settle for less than empowering everyone in your company to help create a truly remarkable customer experience.
Customers want you to talk to them as individuals. It makes business sense to do so. McKinsey & Company studies show that personalization reduces acquisition costs as much as 50%, lifts revenues by 5-15%, and increases the efficiency of marketing spend by 10-30%. ActiveCampaign goes way beyond “Dear [first_name]” and lets you use dynamic content to personalize text and images based on the way a customer browses and buys. And we’re innovating with machine learning, bringing you predictive sending and predictive content to automatically send the right message to the right person at the right time. ActiveCampaign lets you bring your customer data into one central place, and stay closely connected with customers as you grow.
We’ve all seen analytics that are interesting, but not actionable. With ActiveCampaign, you can turn insights into actions and systematically improve performance.
Conversion Attribution
View customer paths from first message all the way to purchase, and better allocate your marketing investments.
Split Tests and Split Actions
Compare how customers engage with different message variations, and optimize accordingly.
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Track “micro-conversions” within the steps of your automations.
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