Email Marketing For Small Businesses: How To Improve Your Marketing ROI

IPT Ltd recently published some survey results which made for very interesting reading. They asked the public what they considered to be the most effective marketing medium. No surprises to see TV coming in first with 37%, but a surprising second place was email, coming in with 32%! Which approach do you think will generate the best return for a small business? Yes, small business email marketing!

Obviously, you’ll need your customers’ contact details, as well as any new prospects, in order for your small business email marketing plan to be successful.

There are two ways you can get people who visit your business to give you their contact details. Have them fill out a form on-premises for you to manually upload later, or (best option) direct them to your website where they can fill out a signup form.

To make sure that people actually want to give you their data, you’ll need to offer them some kind of incentive. Buy one get one free offers, contests and even valuable free information do a good job. Each person who completes the subscription form becomes a member of your email “club”, people you can contact again and again.

There’s a well-known business maxim that “people only do business with people they like” and add “know and trust” to it, and that’s the point of online email marketing. Every email you send will build trust and the likelihood that the email prospect will buy from you when the time is right.

Small business email marketing is a very good business building decision for all small businesses. In addition to being extremely profitable, emails build trust, credibility, and allow you to message your customers the moment they’re ready to buy, whether it’s the third email you send, the 14th, or the 154th.

A good small business email marketing approach is to describe a problem your target market is having and suggest your product or service as a solution. As you show understanding of the problem, on a subconscious level the recipient of your email will know that you can solve it. Another way is to provide useful tips that people can use, as this shows knowledge and experience. Also sending an email with a coupon that can be printed and used as a discount is also a good email marketing business approach.

The same research conducted by IPT also shows that the most influential aspect of an email communication is discounts or rebates with 27%, second place is general interest in the product or service with 24% and third place together with 20% is the raffle for prizes and familiarity with the brand. These statistics should help you in your decisions about what to include in your own small business email marketing campaign.

One ‘real’ world example of small business email marketing success that I can think of is a dog breeder who started a monthly newsletter with photos of the dogs they had available. This meant that if a person came by and didn’t want any of the dogs on that particular day, he could sign up for the email newsletter and receive photos of new dogs every month, without having to visit the breeder’s house. Now these dogs were selling for around $1300 each so this was a brilliant way to keep in touch with potential dog buyers.

You only need to look at the Fortune Global 500 corporations for more examples of email marketing success. They recognize that keeping in touch with customers and customers through email can lower their advertising costs and lead to more sales. With small business email marketing, you can easily get to the stage where an email blast is more successful than £2,000 for a full page newspaper ad.

So, what are you waiting for? Let’s start then…