When you run your own business, marketing is the most important task on your list if you want to thrive. With so many ways to reach people thanks to social media, blogging, SEO and online advertising, many mums who run their own small businesses may well feel that email marketing is a thing of the past and no longer an especially relevant thing to include in their strategies.
However, this isn't necessarily the case, and when done well and with the right tools, a lot of businesses are having a lot of success with email marketing even in 2017.
Why Is Email Marketing Still Effective?
It isn't just that email marketing works well, actually, it can even be more effective than some other online approaches. On social media, marketers can lose a lot of their impact because people see so many promotional posts and ads that they simply tune them out. On websites, many people use ad blockers so even ads that could be relevant and interesting to them are never seen. With so much noise from advertisers as people look at things on the web, online and social media promotion can lose its edge.
Email Is Direct and Personal
When someone looks at their email inbox, however, they are not distracted from the marketing messages by the things they actually went there to look at, like their search engine results or their Facebook news feed. Even without opening an email, they at the very least read the subject to decide if it is interesting, and this means your message has a bit more of their attention. Should they open the email, it's because they want to see what it is offering. Most people don't use email so much these days for personal conversations, favouring instant messaging, so they have a smaller inbox volume to go through, and if your offer sounds interesting they are actually more likely to read
the mail than in the past.
Targeting with Email
Of course, one downside to email marketing is that you have to build up a mailing list to send things to in the first place. There are some great tools to help people in B2B small businesses do this such as The Email Finder. If you sell to consumers then you can also employ tactics like offering special offers to people who sign up for your emails on your website or buy products from you, enabling you to build up a mailing list that is already receptive to your business.
There is no perfect approach to marketing that works for every small business, however it is best not to rule out email marketing as part of your approach. It may not be the only approach you should be using, however writing it off as outdated can actually be the wrong way to think about it. Everybody still uses email, after all, and with fewer competing marketers it can be a great way to reach people.
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