Among the dozens of rocks of advertisement, there is email marketing that could prove out to be the ultimate diamond for small businesses. Basically, small businesses require things that could garner a lot of traffic, but at the same time, not put a dent on their budget. If you want to get all technical about it, these businesses require a high ROI that could boost their traffic as well as sales. And, we’re here to tell you that email marketing is the one thing that could be the lifesaver you’re looking for. This guide is perfect for folks that have absolutely no knowledge of email marketing, but want to get on it to see what the hype is all about. Without further ado, let’s get right to it.
What is Email Marketing?
Well the name is pretty explanatory. It’s the process of advertising your business or product through the old school way, emails. A more accurate description for email marketing would be that it is the process of emailing a bunch of people your brochure, your product description or details regarding your services and motivating them to pay you cash. Sound simple enough?
The reason why email marketing is considered a viable source of advertisement is because it is an authentic source of marketing. It’s not like Facebook where half the accounts belong to fake aliases and dead people. On the other hand, email accounts are mostly active and as of 2019, there are 5.6 billion active accounts worldwide. If that’s not enough to convince you, we’ll gladly welcome you to go through the rest of the article to change your mind.
How Much Does Email Marketing Cost?
The answer to this question is, not a lot. A mid-sized business sending out thousands of emails per day and relying on a third-party manager can expect to pay somewhere around $1000. However, considering the fact that you’re going to be managing the real work on your own and just be paying for the email list, your costs will go significantly down. Renting email lists costs you around $100 CPM (Cost per mille, which is just a fancy way of saying ‘cost per thousand’). However, if you start getting all demographic and being picky about the type of audience included in the list, your prices could go up. Ultimately, if you’re picking age group, marital status, locality or some stuff like that, a single email address could cost up to a dollar. Yes, that is a hefty price, but do allow us to explain.
So, the thing about email marketing is that, it’s just like anything out there. You could buy it cheap and it would still do the job, or you could spend a fair bit of money and get something that does the exact same job but just better. Email marketing could cost you if you really target your audience, but you should take a look at a little something called ‘Return on Investment’. And, email marketing offers one of the highest ROIs in the world of advertisement. The number could go up to 3,800%. If you don’t know what that means, you could potentially make $38 by just spending a single dollar (reported by EmailMonday). These numbers are absolutely amazing, and if you’re a small business with a tight financial situation, you should be all over this.
Email Marketing vs Other Forms of Advertisement
So, there are a lot of reasons why email marketing takes the cake versus some other types of advertisements. We’ll go through some of those reason one by one.
Legit Audience
Think about what type of people use Facebook. Everyone from 9 year olds streaming Fortnite on their accounts to seniors that search “My grandson Nathan” and everyone in between. You’re ultimately advertising to all of them and most of them aren’t even going to bother with your service or product. On the other hand, people that still use emails are professionals that log in everyday first thing in the morning. Which of the two are more likely to make a purchase from your site?
Cost-Effective:
We don’t need to say much about this. We talked about how much does email marketing cost a little earlier.
We don’t need to say much about this. We talked about how much does email marketing cost a little earlier.
More Acceptable to Errors
Suppose you put out a piece of content and got it advertised on Facebook. Now, you paid for sponsorship, people viewed your content, however, the content was persuasive. You wasted all that money and got nothing out of it. On the other hand, if you did the same thing on email marketing, it wouldn’t cost you anything more than just a bit of time. You just sent out wrong content, it didn’t work, just edit it before sending it to more people on your mailing list. It’s that simple. Many businesses actually use email marketing just to test out content before putting it on their site. It really goes to show how email marketing is much more than just a sales tool and can be used to improve your business as a whole.
No Character Limits
You can advertise on Twitter, on Facebook, on billboards and in the newspaper. All of these will get you results, but what’s the one thing these mediums have in common that email doesn’t? The heading sort of spoiled this, but yes, it’s character limit. Email has no restrictions when it comes to the amount of words, so let your creativity go wild and type all you want. No one will stop you!
Creating a Database for Email Marketing
There’s two ways to make a database for email marketing.
Your Own Newsletters:
This is the simpler and more legit way of getting email addresses for your email marketing. All you need to do is incorporate a simple popup encouraging the user to enter into your newsletter. The reason why we call this the more legit way is because the people that sign up to your newsletters are people that are actually interested in your business or product. The audience you’re getting is already targeted to perfection. They’ll want to hear what you’re saying and in the world of email marketing, one such email address is worth about twenty you’re going to get from the second way.
Paying People for Email Databases
This is sort of the cheap way to get emails but sometimes it’s the only way. A new business can have trouble with encourage people to sign up since their product isn’t exactly in a form that people would like. They still have a way to go and clients might be irritated when asked to enter their emails. So, your last resort is to contact folks that collect these email addresses for you. However, these databases are never 100% accurate. By accurate, we mean that it’s not certain that all of these emails are in use. To understand this, you need to understand how email databases are made. There are some legit ways, but most of the methods to get email addresses are scams. Things like “Sign up with your email to win the lottery” are how database creators earn their bread and butter. So, there’s a huge chance that only a couple of email per ten emails are active and being used every single day.
The Don’ts of Email Marketing for Small Businesses
Don’t Use the Same Content
A serious problem with most email marketers is that they tend to use the same content for extended periods of time. The need of the user changes over time and one way to persuade the customer could possibly be useless after just a couple of weeks. That’s how marketing works. If you’re using five month old content today, you shouldn’t have too high expectations from your email marketing campaign because you’re not going to make much cash or gain much traffic off of it.
Avoid Using Filtered Terminologies
Your entire goal as an email marketer is to avoid the ‘Spam’ section. Once Google decides that you’re just spamming emails, they’ll blacklist your company and force each of your emails to go directly into the spam folder, the dark void of emails that no one ever bother to go to. If you use words like ‘free’, ‘cash’, ‘sale’ and so on, you’re telling Google that you’re randomly spamming people and Google in reply, will gently pick you up with it’s pinky, and drop you in the spam folder.
Limit the Number of Emails to a Single Address
The next mistake that a lot of people make is spam. You should never, ever spam your customers because that doesn’t make your clients mad, it disrupts the reputation of your business. That’s just how the general public views companies that spam their email.
Don’t Send Emails from the Business Email
The thing about email marketing is that you need to prove to your clients that you’re legit and not some stuck up corporation. If you’re sending emails from marketing@company_name.com, there’s a huge chance that your email will be ignored. Instead, you should send emails from an actual person’s account. The person should be a higher up in your business like the head of marketing, or even better, your CEO. It’s not important whether or not the CEO or head of marketing is using that account themselves, it’s just their name that needs to be on the top of those emails.