If you have never tried to do small business email marketing, its good you start thinking about it seriously. You may be leaving so many prospective customers out.

Small business email marketing is the most cost effective marketing tool that delivers the highest return on investment.

With well planed email marketing programs, well crafted messages and targeted customers, small businesses achieve high response rates at very low costs whether they are doing a business to business mail marketing(B2B email marketing) or business to customer email marketing(B2C email marketing).

small business email marketing is currently the most commonly used online marketing tool for those with small businesses and also those doing affiliate email marketing. The reasons are plentiful. Nothing can beat it when it comes to marketing success.

Listed below are 20 benefits of small business email marketing

Advantages of Email Marketing

1. Universal reach: whether behind the desk of your office or at the comfort of your sofa at home, you can reach your target client anywhere in the world no matter the distance.
2. Relatively Lower cost: the physical Costs incurred in designing effective email marketing are by far much lower than the paper-based direct mail.
3. Ease of personalization. It is easier and cheaper to personalize email than any other media enabling you to create a special personal relationship with your prospects.
4. Targeted marketing: e-mail marketing enables you to reach only those who might require your services without bothering those who do not. With prepackaged and custom-built lists are available, you could reach your targets based on geography, age, income, sex, and many other parameters.
5. Measurable results: using Special tools available you can accurately measure return on investment, click-through rate, conversion rate, etc, to enable you to assess the success of your email campaign.
6. High chances of success. With Over 50% of Internet users checking or sending emails daily, there are very high chances of success.
7. Opt-in email marketing tool. Opt-in options helps you to shortlist your prospects and reach only the ones genuinely interested in what you are offering.
8. Options for testing. It is relatively easy and cost effective to test different email content and formats creatively to see which format yields the highest returns.
9. Great chances of repeat business. People who buy from you and you keep communicating with have very high chances of buying from you again without much effort.
10. Faster response: It only takes you're a day for responses to start trickling in and within 12 days, the maximum responses will have been generated.
11. Faster campaign life cycle. The whole campaign lifecycle tends to be shorter with almost instant responses making it the fastest marketing tool.
12. Interactive: since e-mail marketing is dynamic, you can creatively initiate campaigns using graphics, videos, music, quiz, game or any other medium which you feel that your prospects will highly respond t
13. Flexibility in marketing. Through the use an aoutoresponnder, you can still communicate with you prospects even when you are out of office.
14. Simplest: email marketing is the simplest marketing campaign tool and does not require extensive resources
15. Impulsive response results. Email marketing encourages click through to a website where the offer can be redeemed immediately this increases the likelihood of an immediate, impulsive response
16. Ease of integration. Email marketing can easily be integrated with other direct marketing media like direct mail, mobile messaging or web personalization to increase response chances.
17. It allows you to take the message to your audience, as opposed to a website that waits for customers to come in.
18. No paper work. Email marketing does not require papers as everything is electronic
19. An opportunity to build strong customer feedback. Through the email, you can develop a good relationship with customers where you can request for their feedback which helps you get some vital information about your customer's tastes and preferences, and use such information to tailor make their services.
20. Instant information distribution. The speed at which an email is transmitted allows you to handle special cases like immediate resolution of customer complaints.

EFFECTIVE EMAIL MARKETING

An effective small business email marketing system should have the following;

• It should allow customer targeting
• It should be data driven
• It should build relationships, loyalty and trust
• It should support sales through other channels

Tracking the Effectiveness of email marketing

Today, measuring the effectiveness of small business email marketing is much easier especially tracking open rate and click through rate. This helps you discover the number of customers that are reading and responding to your messages

Email marketing plan

For an effective small business email marketing campaign, email marketing plan is a must as it will give you the major guidelines of your purpose.Before you even begin your email marketing campaign, a plan will help you set goals on what you expect to accomplish at the end of your campaign.

Here's is a basic guideline of an email marketing plan

• Define your target
• Set realistic goals of your project
• Determine your email marketing tool
• Set a timeline
• Establish a budget for the project
• etc

Bulk Email Online Marketing

Mass email marketing is where you are able to send out your promotional advertisements to targeted audiences who have shown interest in your products or services.

By using mass email marketing software or using the services of a direct email marketing firm, you will be able to do one to one email marketing by sending mass emails to target audience. This is an enormous help in terms of generating sales because consumers who are interested in hearing about what you are offering will respond by visiting your website and making a purchase.

Email direct marketing can greatly increase the amount of traffic that you are getting to your website and if you have the capacity, never shy away of using this software as your email direct marketing tool.

Opt-in EMAIL MARKETING

Permission based email marketing also known as opt in email marketing is a method of advertising via e-mail whereby the recipient of the email has consented to receive it. This helps in avoiding your mails from being spammed.

It works by requesting your prospective clients to subscribe to you newsletter. The subscribed (opted-in) contact information is stored in a database and the contacts will be sent targeted information.

The key to getting your emails read is to target the customers and prospects who want to hear from you. Give them the option to be added to your mailing list on your website and in your online ads. You can achieve this by offering special discounts to subscribers as well as writing interesting newsletters.

Opt in email marketing tool was developed by marketers to eliminate the disadvantages of e-mail marketing.

ADVANTAGES OF OF PERMISSION BASED EMAIL MARKETING

• Permission based small business email marketing is officially permitted while unsolicited bulk email is unlawful.
• Unsolicited bulk email is not targeted which result in poor results if any.
• Permission based email marketing portrays a professional, ethical image - unsolicited bulk email does not.

Small business Email Marketing Strategies.

small business Email marketing best practices demand communications that go beyond advertising, respect the customer, and speak in a familiar one-on-one style.

Below are 14 strategic small business email marketing tips which if used correctly make your small business email marketing successful.

1. Get Permission. Of all media email is he only one where it's most critical to have explicit permission to communicate with customers. Without permission you not only risk losing customer goodwill and inviting CAN-SPAM penalties, you could end up blacklisted by ISPs that refuse all mail coming from your domain if spamming complaints have been lodged against you. Scroll down to read a subtopic about permission based email marketing.
2. Build a Targeted email marketing list. You can build your list by asking people to subscribe to your newsletters
3. Only email those who have allowed you to. This prevents your mails from being spammed
4. Be persistent. It takes time for customers to fully trust you especially online.
5. Focus on One Message. While this may not apply for newsletters, if you are sending non-newsletter email, be precise and specific to one message because it has been proven that most people skim through a message and therefore your message should be easy to absorb be before he clicks delete
6. Personalize your message. Use the recipient's name in your message whenever when addressing him. A customer is more likely to develop a relationship with a person who is addressing him on a personal capacity.
7. Over-deliver in your promise. Make sure that a greater value than what you promised when your customer was subscribing to your newsletter. This makes the customer feel that he is taking more than he is giving.
8. Include a Call to Action. Each email you send should spell out exactly what you want the recipient to do. Make links obvious and call attention to any special directions you are providing. And it's okay to be repetitive when it comes to the call to action - include it toward the top of the message and mention it again at the end.
9. Be consistent. If you are offering a monthly newsletter, always make sure it is timely and on the same date of the month and if possible, the same time.
10. Have a working email marketing auto responder An auto responder is an email that is scheduled to be sent at a certain time interval after someone subscribes to your mailing list. Auto responders are a great way to automatically follow up with your subscribers or provide them with more information on your products/services. An auto responder makes communication with a new subscriber easy and also builds trust to your brand, and this can help make it easier when trying to close sales in the future.
11. Have your signature on all your mails. Always include a signature at the bottom of your emails, as it's one of the easiest ways to attract more traffic to your website. This signature should include your personal details and a link to your website.
12. Use html email marketing. Whenever possible use it as an alternative to text. When done properly, it has higher chances of action than text.
13. Try video email marketing. Give a face and a voice to your messages with video email marketing. Successful viral video marketing campaigns utilize short-form content that is between :15 to :30 seconds in length, with Consumer Packaged Goods (CPGs) driving nearly 20 percent of social video views
14. Keep your email marketing costs relatively low. With good and effective email marketing metrics it is possible to have lower costs in your small business email marketing.

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