It is a little worrying how many small business owners in South Africa are unaware of the many benefits e-mail marketing can have. Today e-mail marketing is an effective tool used by entrepreneurs to expand their operations.
Here we will touch on why investing in e-mail marketing software is beneficial. We will also look into some of the worthwhile software available.
Key Take Aways
- Small businesses are in a fantastic position to profit from email marketing
- Let people who have interest in subscribing know exactly what they are in for before signing up.
- Always keep score of how your e-mails circulate
- Mailchimp giving you recommendations for enhancing your marketing operations
- FluentCRM’s automation elements lets you send programmed, and organized emails to your subscribers
- ActiveCampaign offers multiple handy free tools, no matter if you are a customer or not.
- FluentCRM not just fantastic software for e-mails, but it also lets you take control of managing your customers.
Take Advantage
Small businesses are in a fantastic position to profit from email marketing, as it gives them the edge in improving brand perception. For instance, you are a small business owner and as such you are more likely to care about smaller communities as you resonate with their needs.
Building a one-on-one relationship with locals through e-mail channels makes building trust easier when compared to big corporations who don’t really care.
Be Real and Get Subscribers
A major flaw that many small businesses make is not being transparent, honest, and open as possible with their customers when resorting to e-mail marketing. Unwanted or standard e-mails have lost their touch =and falling out of favour.
Most consumers of today resonate better when a company is authentic and as innate as possible. You want people to like you obviously. With that being said you should set your sights on getting your customers to subscribe to your newsletters or other material.
Always make it easy for customers to subscribe to your newsletter. Don’t overcomplicate it or add too many steps. Let people who have interest in subscribing know exactly what they are in for before signing up. You will have a ton of egg in the face if your subscribers are provided with different content than what you lead them to believe.
Quality and Community
The internet has become a cesspool of business competition. As a small business with local influence, you should take advantage of your surroundings to promote your brand as a professional in the area.
You can do this by strategically using your e-mail marketing. Building a status as a local expert using your email content helps to bolster robust customer relationships, which are important to small businesses.
Sizing Success in E-mail Marketing
Knowing how successful your e-mail marketing efforts are, is just one of the cornerstones to amassing more growth. You can measure the accomplishments of your campaigns through various means.
For one keeping score of how many e-mails your subscribers mark as spam compared to how they forward. Otherwise you can also compare how many emails were deleted before or after opening. These are just a few ways you can gain valued perceptions that will be a great benefit to adjusting your email marketing operations.
Benefits of E-mail Marketing
To further entice you into using e-mail marketing software, here are a few benefits.
Hitting Your Target Audience
Imagine sending out flyers to random strangers about your business, but no one shows the slightest interest. You can avoid this mishap as e-mail marketing allows you to hit your intended market from anywhere. Think about it, how often do you really pay attention to billboards, promotional flyers or on television advertisements. People pay more attention to their e-mails, but don’t overdo it.
Sending ground-breaking, imaginative, and effective emails would be your best bet- your subscribers would rather have quality than quantity in this case. So not only do people regularly check their email, but when they do they are likely to take interest in something that is persuasive, influential and engaging.
E-mail marketing software is an effective way your small business can effortlessly reach an audience that is willing to read and take part in your offer.
Saving Money
Cash strapped small businesses can get in more customers without spending much, so getting the most bang for your buck means using e-mail marketing.
Think about it, have a look how much printing flyers will cost you, and how many will be sent “flying” to the bin. Likewise, attending conferences, and hiring help are all expensive ways to spread the word. They have some value yes but it isn’t really something a small business can afford to do regularly. E-mail, however, can be done on a regular basis and will probably increase traffic through word of mouth.
(We wrote something cool about referral programs here that you can add in your e-mail arsenal)
So with low costs and high return on investments e-mail marketing is a small business win.
Effective Call to Action
Having an attractive sales gimmick on television or radio might be great, but won’t bring anything in if your target audience can’t remember the name or information of your business. The point of advertising is to encourage action.
If done right, your e-mail will inspire customers to invest in your product or service. You can end your e-mail by encouraging your audience to “call now” or “email today”. This saves time on looking for your business and they can get in direct contact with you.
Now it’s time for our e-mail marketing software recommendations.
MailChimp
Here’s a name you might be familiar with or perhaps you might have seen their yellow monkey on social media. With its ease of use and variety of features MailChimp is well suited for a small business with their pay-as-you-go plan.
There are heaps of integrations available for MailChimp, which has made it even more popular over the years. You can easily integrate your online store and use their marketing tools to further your reach.
This e-mail marketing does not monkey around and has added some artificial intelligence abilities. This is particularly useful for audience analytics and giving you recommendations for enhancing your marketing operations. In our opinion there really is a lot to like about MailChimp.
Mailerlite
When it comes to MailerLite you will find an e-mail marketing software that delivers more knockout blows than many other e-mail spreading software. For a reasonable monthly fee, you will be able to build email campaigns, systematize new subscriber registrations, while designing and hosting your landing page. Sounds pretty good.
MailerLite is lightweight but packs a punch. It is newsletter software that gets to the point. For newbies, their e-mail editor is user-friendly and the entire structure is hassle free to set up.
Mailerlite’s free plan boasts a generous number of features and when compared to other software paid plans it is cheaper than the competition.
The automation is useful, but steers away from being as complicated as full marketing automation tools. With its many features and simplistic use, MailerLite will certainly be worth looking into.
Active Campaign
If you have done a little more research on ActiveCampaign you will notice that it is an extremely tough software to beat. Here you will find an exceptional approach to get simplified e-mail marketing solutions.
Not only do they offer almost everything you need to communicate with your customers via e-mail, but their approach is also first class.
For Instance, their statistics reports are loaded with insight into virtually all facets of your campaign. These include aspects like page visits, geo-tracking, openers, e-commerce, and a lot more.
It has however come to our attention that the email builder does not provide an experience which is as smooth as other software out there. With a few troublesome features, such as the revision history, there can be some improvement.
The support is just as you would expect. Here is a crew of friendly, helpful, and speedy bunch of guys and gals at your service. Their knowledge base is easy to search around on and gives you related results most of the time. If you sign up to their ‘Plus’ plan you can get access to person-to-person training and useful webinars, which is nice to have.
Lastly, ActiveCampaign offers multiple handy free tools, no matter if you are a customer or not. These include tools like content and social media calendar templates to a subject line generator.
FluentCRM
Introducing an e-mail marketing automation software committed to WordPress users. FluentCRM is a handy self-hosted e-mail Marketing software for WordPress. You can handle your leads and email campaigns while observing user activities without the need to leave your WordPress dashboard.
FluentCRM’s automation elements lets you send programmed, and organized emails to your subscribers. Generally, this is not just fantastic software for e-mails, but it also lets you take control of managing your customer relations.
Conclusion
Many small businesses aren’t aware of the benefits of email marketing, yet there are many. When implementing a fierce and valuable e-mail marketing strategy you can find new customers, keep them, and stay in contact with them while spending very little time and money.
All of the e-mail software programs listed above will give you all the tools needed to skyrocket your business. Executing useful e-mail marketing strategies, guarantees you a higher return on investment.
