It isn’t always easy to reach out to potential customers. For a new company, the first momentous steps are always the hardest. How on earth do you show people what you can offer? In recent years, the answer for many small businesses has been email marketing.
Email is a staggeringly prevalent mode of communication. In 2019 there were 3.9 billion email users worldwide – around half the population of the world! Marketing via email can reach a vast audience, and it is increasingly effective. In a 2017 study conducted by Fluent, 68% of millennial survey takers said that promotional emails impacted their purchasing decisions. In fact, Fluent found that email marketing was the most effective digital advertising medium targeting millennial consumers. Unless you employ IT or marketing staff, you’ll be looking for workarounds to help you make the most of email data without it being hugely costly or time draining.
The benefits of using an email database to market your service or product are huge. The process, however, can be time-consuming and frustrating. In order to really utilize email, it is worth considering a couple of pointers before letting the emails fly.
Broaden Your Appeal, Narrow Your Marketing Data
Building and keeping an extensive database of emails has benefits, but poor database hygiene can scupper your efforts. Poor database hygiene – duplicates, out of date emails, misspelled names – often comes about when no constraints are placed on the data that is collected. Make sure you set very clear rules and boundaries for what emails you are collecting. All business leaders know that a detailed knowledge of their target audience is crucial for success. The same applies to the collection of email data. Make sure you only collect relevant emails to avoid a crisis of accumulation.
It may be worth investing in some database cleaning automation. This will allow you to filter out irrelevant data while ensuring that you still get in contact with potential customers. Automation also frees up time for more marketing innovation: time that otherwise would have been spent sifting through emails.
The Market for Markets
The prevalence of email marketing has led to a market for markets of a sort. Companies starting up or wanting to beef up their email marketing database can choose to purchase lead lists. The benefit of doing this is that companies selling lead lists offer data tailored towards specific uses.
For instance, a marketing database from leadlists.com.au allows for the targeting of other businesses, as opposed to lay consumers. Getting the right data for the job makes email marketing far more effective.
However, care must be taken when shopping the market for markets: make sure you review data samples to check whether they correlate with your existing consumer data. If it doesn’t, simply shop around.
Ultimately, the best bit of advice is a classic one: know your market. The benefits of email marketing can only truly be reaped when you target your acquisition of data. Email marketing is extremely powerful, but only when carefully applied.
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