Email Marketing For Small Business Success

Email Marketing is rapidly becoming known as the most affordable and effective option to connect with both customers and prospects in a meaningful way.

The variety of email marketing services ranges from a completely outsourced solution to a do-it-yourself strategy using either in-house or hosted solutions.

The option selected will depend on the needs and budget of the company that is considering adopting email marketing strategies.

Some of the benefits being realized over traditional media include:

The ability to quickly track results.
Email marketing allows businesses to instantly track the response rate of any given campaign. When used properly, email marketing is reported to be second only to search engine optimization in its ability to target prospects.

Significantly shorter development and production time.
Creating effective copy can be accomplished within minutes or hours as compared to days, weeks, or even months for some traditional media.

Dramatically reduced cost of production and deployment.
Production costs are considerably lower when creating sales and advertising copy for email marketing. Royalty-free images and readily available information make it easy to streamline and fast-track creatives.

Shortened sales cycle.
With some traditional media, the sales cycle can be days or even weeks before the message begins to propagate. Direct mail can take days to be printed, metered, and delivered. In some industries, that sort of time delay can cause businesses to miss out on critical window of opportunity.

Ability to collect and manage significant data.
When integrated with autoresponder technology, lead capture forms, and split-testing, businesses have the ability to drill down to specific detailed levels of information for each prospect and customer. Effective data management allows businesses to maximize profits and increase efficiencies.

Propensity to trigger viral marketing via word of mouth and industry buzz.
With traditional media, an ad that appeals to an individual may not be readily available to share with peers. Over time, peer buzz can occur via social interaction. With email marketing, interacting with peers and sharing content is as simple as forwarding the received message. Done properly, this sort of peer-to-peer sharing can quickly create a viral buzz that can translate to more profits.

Environmentally Friendly.
One of the more obvious benefits to email marketing over print media is the fact that email marketing is paper-free.

Businesses must take care to ensure that email marketing campaigns are CAN-SPAM compliant and that subscriber data is managed responsibly. By having and adhering to a clear privacy policy and managing subscriber lists effectively, small businesses can easily realize significant benefits and increased credibility with prospects and customers.

Email Marketing
Email Marketing