The Benefits of Email Marketing for Small Businesses

Do you own a small to medium sized business and are looking at effective ways to grow sales? Lets look at the benefits of email marketing for small businesses and explain the various options available to you to ensure an effective email campaign.

Firstly lets go over the value of building your email database. Over the past five years I have been capturing as many email addresses passing through my website as possible. Every email that goes through my contact forms are stored in an Excel spreadsheet or database ready to be brought out in future marketing campaigns.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a way of capturing email addresses from the traffic that goes through your website.

Here are my reasons why. Whenever I carry out an email marketing campaign for one of my clients I always have focus points within the email to direct their potential as well as existing customers to certain parts of my clients website.

For example, one of my clients recently launched a new food menu in their pub as well as needing to promote an event. Within the email there were two trigger points, one linking direct to the new menu but the main focus target was capturing peoples attention for the event. This focus area was featured at a prominent area of the email newsletter as well as being in the email subject line.

From approximately 800 emails that were sent out to my clients subscriber list, within 48 hours of the campaign being sent out the visitor rate to their website increased by nearly 600%.

 

The Execution

So you have got your database of email addresses and so the first thing that you may need to consider is the method you are going to use to execute your email marketing campaign.

There are several options available to you such as paying a company like us to to take care of everything from start to finish, or using companies such as Mail Chimp or if you want to have all of the control yourself then we can recommend  to go for SendBlaster.

SendBlaster’s tool can be downloaded on to your PC and can be set to send emails throughout the day to prevent your IP or domain name from being blacklisted for SPAM. At less than £100 this marketing tool can be one of the best investments you make for your business.

 

Collecting email addresses on your website

This is such a simple yet overlooked area which you can fix within moments. In prominent areas of your website, whether its on the top of a sidebar or on the footer of every page you absolutely need to have a subscription contact form.

On the site I designed for Bingo Supermarket (Click Here to take a look) we have positioned a Subscribe form near the top of the homepage and on the footer of each page. In just over six months this site has captured over 1500 names and email addresses.

Each month we send out over 5000 emails to their subscriber list which in turn helps to generate over 16,000 visits to their website each month. For an Ecommerce website, traffic means sales!

Dont underestimate the benefits of email marketing for small businesses, no matter what size your organisation is this tool is invaluable.

I hope you enjoy this video I came across a few weeks ago that sums everything up in a nutshell. Happy marketing everyone!

 

 

Follow us on Twitter to get instant access to all of our marketing tips.