“Email marketing lends itself to automation, and anytime you
automate something you end up saving a lot of time”.

Chloe Mason Gray
Digital marketer, writer

According to a survey that Sales Force conducted recently, 91% of US consumers use email every day. Another interesting number that they came across: for every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Email holds all the parts of a digital marketing strategy together, helping you strengthen connections with website visitors, social media followers, and past customers. Email marketing is a growing industry, it has been for a long time. For one reason, because it works. Email marketing can achieve better conversion rates than any other channel. If you’re not doing email marketing right now, this alone should be enough to convince you.

Start inviting people to join your email list by offering something of value, such as special offers for subscribers or access to entertaining content. Here are a few ways you could do that:

  1. Put subscription links on your most popular web pages or create a landing page for this purpose only
  2. Use social media sign-up apps to invite your followers to share with you
  3. Use guest books at your physical location and give all your customers and visitors an invitation to stay in touch
  4. Use sign-in sheets at your events for visitors who visit your booths

These tools can have a massive impact on your sales especially if you are struggling with a customer acquisition issue. Be consistent with your strategy and the results will speak for itself. The bottom line is the bottom line and this is it. Email makes money, it’s true. But it depends on how accurately your company manages it. Just setting up a campaign and letting it run is not enough. Invest the time to properly understand your audience, this will determine how you engage them through email in order to be profitable. Anyway, keep the sign-up process as simple as possible. In many cases, all you really need is a name and an email address.

You can also hire a professional company that provides eMail Marketing services to give you a jumpstart on leveraging email data that you might not have. This also works perfectly if you can envision the bigger picture. It’s like asking for additional hands to take you through your journey. Make sure your eMail service provider (ESP) can do these few things:

  1. Explains their strategy of connecting your message with the potential readers
  2. Provides social media leveraging to ensure social media users are seeing your messages too.
  3. Provides a breakdown on the audience that will be seeing your message
  4. Ensures that mobile email readers can view emails on the go
  5. Provides reports and observation of your email campaign to improve your strategy
  6. Can assist you with the designing of your content and help you set up the perfect campaign.

Do you need more statistics to convince yourself? Well, here you are. As stated in Sales Force, 95% of online consumers use email and 91% of those consumers reported checking their email once a day. It means that you’ve got access to 95% of your audience through email. Consider starting an email newsletter that goes out weekly or monthly and includes a variety of content, such as how-to articles, updates about your business or important industry news. Besides text, email newsletters can include images, video and audio, and are a great way to introduce new products or services to an audience that’s already shown interest in your business. Next, you can send occasional sales promotions along with your regular newsletter.

So why is email marketing so powerful? Because social media moves fast, so fast that if you’re audience doesn’t see your content within a relatively small timeframe it’s more than likely they won’t see it at all. Compare that with email where the lifespan is often until whoever is targeted at decides to deal with it.

Email has a very low risk. Of course being a savvy marketer will result in better campaigns and better results. However creating marketing campaigns with a healthy return on investment can be done by a novice with a little time and research. To get serious about email marketing, you need to use an (Email Software Provider) ESP. ESPs provide the platform to manage your subscriber list, automate your sending schedule, and—most importantly—collect data on the emails you send, such as how many subscribers opened the email or clicked on a link in the message. This data can help you determine which types of offers or newsletters are most popular with your audience, so you can target your emails even more effectively.

MI Group provides both Professional eMail Marketing services as well as its own ESP for small businesses in the Caribbean and Latin America. Sign up for a free demo today!