In an era dominated by social media and search engine optimization, it’s easy to overlook one of the most effective and reliable marketing tools available: email marketing. While it might seem like an outdated strategy, email marketing continues to prove its worth, especially for small businesses with limited budgets and resources.

In this blog post, we’ll delve into the world of email marketing and explore why it’s a game-changer for small businesses looking to maximize their marketing efforts and achieve a strong return on investment (ROI).

Why Email Marketing Matters

Direct and Personalized Communication

Unlike most other marketing channels, email marketing allows you to speak directly to your audience. You’re not at the mercy of algorithms or search engine rankings. With a well-crafted email, you can engage your subscribers on a personal level, addressing their specific needs and interests.

Cost-Effective Marketing

Small businesses often struggle with limited budgets. Email marketing is incredibly cost-effective, requiring minimal investment compared to other advertising methods. You can reach a large audience without breaking the bank.

High ROI Potential

Email marketing consistently delivers one of the highest ROIs of any marketing channel. When done right, it can generate substantial revenue for your business. The key lies in crafting compelling emails, segmenting your audience, and tracking performance.

Building and Nurturing Relationships

Email is an excellent tool for building and nurturing relationships with your customers. You can send them valuable content, exclusive offers, and updates, creating a sense of loyalty and trust that can lead to repeat business.

Getting Started with Email Marketing

Now that you understand the power of email marketing, let’s discuss how to get started:

Build Your Email List

Start by collecting email addresses from your customers and website visitors. Offer incentives such as discounts or free resources to encourage sign-ups.

Choose an Email Marketing Platform

Select a reliable email marketing platform that suits your needs. Popular options include Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and ConvertKit. These platforms offer user-friendly tools to create and send emails.

Craft Engaging Content

Create valuable and relevant content for your email campaigns. This can include product updates, promotions, educational content, and more. Personalize your emails to cater to different segments of your audience.

Measure and Optimize

Track the performance of your email campaigns. Pay attention to open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Use this data to refine your email marketing strategy over time.

Conclusion

Email marketing remains a potent tool for small businesses looking to make a big impact. Its direct, cost-effective, and relationship-building capabilities make it a valuable asset in your marketing toolkit. Embrace email marketing, and you’ll discover that it’s not only effective but also essential for your business’s growth.

Stay tuned for more insights and tips on marketing strategies tailored to small businesses in our upcoming blog posts.

In today’s technology centric world it’s more important than ever to interact with potential customers across a wide variety of social media platforms and channels such as email, social-ads, google ads, re-targeting ads, and more.

The ability to effectively communicate with your primary audience over multiple platforms and channels is called multi-channel marketing. There is a good chance if you have a competitor that is bigger than you are, they are implementing this strategy and you should be as well.

With multi-channel marketing you are effectively creating more opportunities for your prospective audience to see your content, promotions, and products which can lead to more opportunities for potential revenue.

Beginners Guide to Multi-Channel Marketing

Multi-channel marketing is about more than just repeating the same content across all platforms, it’s about leveraging different marketing tactics on multiple platforms in a variety of different ways.

What does this mean exactly and why does it matter?

It means that by utilizing multi-channel marketing we have the ability to customize user experiences depending on what platform they are on and what device they are using. By creating multiple different content strategies tailored to a variety of different channels, we increase the chances of our messaging reaching our target audience in a format that they might appreciate. In creating more than one avenue for consumers to interact with our brand and content, it provides a sense of choice which is just as important as the content itself.

Consistency is Key

Now that you’re utilizing multiple messages, themes, and promotions, it’s important to understand how the customer will experience the content. The process of making sure that the consumer encounters a seamless experience from beginning to end is called an omnichannel.

As you dive into multi-channel marketing strategies you should take a step back and make sure each campaign has a similar feel and a consistent experience. For example, you should make sure all of your ads are built with the same level of thought and design expertise, create landing pages that are unique but provide a similar experience, make sure your messaging is consistent, and make sure that the content is available to all devices.

A good rule of thumb is to test all of your ads on all of your channels from beginning to end to make sure the process of clicking through pages is seamless on all platforms and devices.

Using Data and Automation Rules

As your multi-channel marketing campaigns set off for Mars, you’ll start to collect a fair amount of useful data. Data can provide insights to each of your campaigns including but not limited to impressions, clicks, shares, and conversions. If analyzed properly, you can start tweaking each of your channels to focus on what the messages and ad types they perform best with.

Looking at data and metrics month-over-month for each of your multi-channels can help you determine which strategies are working best and you can continue to tailor the consumer experience every step of the way.

Once your channels are top-notch and pumping out leads, you should consider building out automation rules, specifically email automation rules. Every time a lead fills out a form to see a demo, purchases a product, or downloads your latest white paper, you should be tracking this data and entering them into a well oiled email machine.

Automation is useful for nurturing curious leads who aren’t ready to make a decision yet. Email automation campaigns can be set for any length of time and help cut out the need to create a new email for every single new lead. Email automation further enhance your multi-channel marketing strategies and is one of the most effective ways to keep leads engaged with your business.

Conclusion and First Steps

If you’re serious about optimizing lead generation and increasing revenue as much as possible, multi-channel marketing is a must. Connecting with consumers in as many ways as possible is the lifeblood of most companies and you should start building your channels as soon as possible.

If you aren’t sure where to start, Squatch Marketing specializes in every channel of digital marketing including content creation, social ads, website development, email campaigns, email automation, and landing pages. If you would ever like a free consultation, you can chat with an expert by clicking the chat bubble on the bottom right, or fill out our form and we will reach out to you as soon as we can!

Does your company do email marketing? If not, would you like to? This guide will walk you through the exact steps you need to take to get an email marketing platform up and running for your business.

This step-by-step guide will cover the following topics:

• Choosing a solution that best fits your needs
• Creating an account
• Setting up your account
• Authenticating your sender domain
• Creating sender profiles
• Creating unsubscribe groups
• And you’ll be sending emails in no time!

Fill out the form below to download the guide.

Building email campaigns from scratch might seem like a simple process, right? Think of an idea, build the email, hit send, gain a ton of business… Not quite. We are going to explore a few common mistakes people make when building email campaigns, learn how to avoid them, and explore tactics that can be utilized to increase email success. The most common mistakes are listed below:

Your email looks great on desktop, but it’s not mobile compatible

This is a very common mistake for people who are new to building their own email campaigns. The reason this is easy to overlook is because emails are generally built on desktops and it’s easy to forget that you need to view the email on multiple screen sizes to see how it scales.

A lot of email service providers (ESPs), such as Sendgrid or Mailchimp, have a “view as mobile” option in the email creator. Make sure to check this anytime you make a change to your email to ensure it’s still working on mobile devices. If the ESP you’re using to create emails doesn’t have this as an option, you can test mobile compatibility by sending a test email to a personal or business email address you have on your phone. If the email loads properly on your phone, then it is mobile compatible for almost all devices. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but you can feel generally confident that it’s working.

Overselling a product or service

People think of email campaigns as an additional avenue to sell a product or run promotions, which is true, but that isn’t the only thing you can use email for. Only running product promotions and sales campaigns can get exhausting for your leads. They don’t constantly want to be hearing about your newest promotion, or what your product can do for them.

A good rule of thumb is to make sure you sprinkle in some insightful or helpful content that your leads might actually find useful without having to buy a product. For example:

Week 1: Send out a blog email on a topic that you think is helpful

Week 2: Send out a promotion tying that blog into your product

Week 3: Send another follow-up referencing the blog with a call to action about your product

Just because you are sending an informational email doesn’t mean you won’t get new leads or sales. Properly placed CTAs can go a long way. Keep your emails diverse and think of what you would want to see in an email before you send it.

Using poorly worded subject lines and preview text

Subject lines and preview fields are the foundation of any email campaign. They can either make you or break you. Subject lines and preview fields are important for a few reasons. This is the first thing your leads will see other than your company name. They give a brief snippet of what to expect before actually clicking the email. We want this to be catchy, unique, and fun enough to generate a click. Writing a subject line is kind of like walking a tight-rope. It takes a lot of practice to figure out exactly which kind of subject lines are most successful for your audience, but once you do it’s a great feeling.

Here are some examples of bad subject lines:

• New product promotion
• Save time and money
• Re: New product promotion

Here are some examples of good subject lines:

• Top 10 Email Tips and Tricks 🔟
• Hey [First Name], did you see this? 👀
• Final hours! Will you save 25%?

Can you see the difference? Once you have your subject lines figured out, you need to make sure the preview text of your email is displaying correctly. This is usually a snippet of text that gives a brief overview of what your leads can expect inside the email. This is arguably just as important as the subject line. You need to make sure your preview text is displaying correctly and that it accurately displays your most intriguing points within the email. You don’t want a good subject line and your preview text to say “View online”, that just feels bad. Overall, keep practicing and A/B testing subject lines and figure out what your audience likes the best.

Better emails, better content, more success

Overall, the general theme is make sure your emails are compatible, the content is good, you provide variety, and you’re creative. Make every email unique and put full effort into providing your leads intriguing and interesting email content. If you would like to explore and learn more about how Squatch Marketing can help you achieve these things, request a consultation. If you do, we can provide you a free email mock-up for your business and discuss your email marketing needs.