Why Businesses Should Use E-mail Marketing
E-mail marketing is quite possibly the ideal marketing tool for small businesses. There are a number of reasons why this is so, but the main one is simply this: It gives you global reach, no matter how small you are.
It puts you on something close to an even footing with businesses that are significantly larger than you are. Having said that, there's a right way, and a wrong way to go about email marketing. Without spending too much time focused on the wrong way, let's just call it by name. Buying "canned" email lists from third party vendors. Never a good idea for a number of reasons. Resist the temptation.
Besides, there's a better way. It requires a lot more work, but is immensely more effective.
It involves setting up an email capture box on your site and making your own list slowly, over time. Now, in order to get people to give you their email address, you have to trade with them. You have to offer them something of genuine value. It could be an instant deal coupon for a product of yours, a free report that contains content rich, immediately useful information, anything like that.
And once you've made that trade, they're going to be a lot more receptive to offers from you because they gave you permission to contact them in the first place.
Permission based marketing.
It's about building a genuine relationship with your customers. About having a conversation. Allowing you members to raise their hands and say that they DO want to hear from you. You know you've cracked permission marketing when people miss you when you don't show up. When you don't mail and you get emails asking why not?
In order to get to that point, however, you need to put some basic infrastructure in place in order to manage your email campaigns. There are a number of excellent options out there, but there are two in particular I'd like to draw your attention to.
The first is "Mail Chimp." What makes Mail Chip great is that it's free to start. In fact, it's free until you get more than 500 subscribers on your email list, and then the price begins to rise. That's great, because it allows you to get your feet wet in this arena without having to shell out any money, and by the time the price starts to increase due to your number of subscribers, you're making money off of sales to your list to cover the fees.
Mail Chip has some good reporting features so you can track several different metrics about your email campaigns to see what's working and what isn't. Even better, it's tied into Google Analytics, and both combined give you enormous amounts of data about the state of this end of your business. Here, we're talking about the campaigns ROI, gross revenues generated, number of email transactions, and more.
A few minor tweaks and Mail Chimp could be a great package. As it stands, it ranks as very good. The reports aren't terribly intuitive and the interface can be a little confusing, but all in all it's a great service.
The other one you should consider is "Campaign Monitor." It's a bit more expensive than Mail Chimp, with prices starting at $9 a month, but that's low priced enough that even a fledgling business can afford the outlay. Like Mail Chimp, the more people you have on your list, the higher the service's monthly fee, but again, a bigger list means more sales per mailing, so you can easily afford what you're paying out.
The greatest thing about Campaign Monitor is that it gives you access to some really advanced tools like A/B split testing, so you can create two different versions of the same offer and see which one performs better. This allows you to relentlessly experiment and continually refine your approach, and is invaluable.
It also allows for triggered campaigns that auto-launch based on predefined customer behaviors, which is fabulous. There's a lot to set up on the front end to make full use of these features, but they can be extremely powerful when everything is up and rolling.
Best of all, you're not locked into either of these. Especially when your list is quite small, it's fairly simple to export it from one place and import it to another, which means you can give both of these a try and see which one is the best fit for how you will be using it.