Email marketing is one of the cheapest and the most profitable ways to do online marketing. For example, if you already have a database of contacts, previous customers who have already bought from you before. If you send them sales emails, and they buy from you again, you will be making a profit without having to re-invest in marketing to capture new leads.
"Cheap and effective marketing", this was a search that I found myself reviewing some AdWords campaigns, and I immediately thought that email marketing is still in 2020 the online marketing tool that best meets the two requirements of that search:
An inexpensive marketing tool
And at the same time, an effective tool
It is a perfect combination for small companies and entrepreneurs as well as for large companies.
In this article, we will learn everything that we need to know about Email Marketing. After reading this article, you will be able to determine why you must include this into your business strategy.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a form of online marketing that uses email as a means of communication between a sending party (the sender) and 1 or more receivers (the subscribers). Email is used to send a message to the recipients, which can be:
Promotional or sale
Informative - Newsletter
Contact Information
In other words, we can use email marketing as a means of direct communication between us, our company, and a list of subscribers, clients, or contacts, who will receive our message (email).
In short, it is a communication tool that will allow us to get our message, whatever the type, to our target audience.
This is a simple definition, but I think it serves as a basis for understanding the usefulness and benefits that we will discuss now.
So why don't many companies and entrepreneurs use email marketing?
Answering this question in a generalized way is very complex.
Well, the factors are multiple, and in each case they may be some and not others, but in a generalized way we can see:
1. Bad press. Many people still associate email marketing with SPAM practices, although it is not the same.
2. They don't want to disturb the contacts. Due to the previous point, many people think that they will bother with their emails. Many times, although companies make use of email marketing, they will try to reduce the number of shipments for this same reason.
3. Unawareness Many companies do not know all the benefits of email marketing.
4. Follow other fashions. Online marketing gives a lot of publicity to new trends, and many companies follow them without evaluating options.
5. Bad past results. Sometimes companies try to do an email marketing campaign, and after obtaining bad results they give up thinking that they will never get results.
There are certainly more factors, but these are the most common.
And although we have already seen the benefits of email marketing for companies, many are still looking for other options instead of considering sending emails as an option to do cheap and effective marketing.
So we are going to focus on those points.
What options do we have to do less expensive or cheap marketing?
When we think about doing marketing, online marketing, for our company or business, and that it is also not very expensive, some options directly come to mind:
Social networks. We have all heard stories of companies that went viral until they were successful
Participate in blogs as guests. To achieve visibility by sending content of interest to the blog community in which we want to participate.
With our own blog. Although this is an option that takes time, and cannot always be considered economical.
Reply in forums or on sites like Quora. Again to get visibility.
These would be some of the options to make our brand visible, and get leads, more or less economically or cheaply.
We put aside more "expensive" options such as:
Google AdWords. requires a large investment.
Facebook Ads. Sometimes effective, with the right kind of products or services. Ineffective in other segments.
Linkedin or Twitter Ads. Quite expensive in my experience, although not a bad option for visibility.
Post sponsorship
These options, although effective, are much more expensive than those we had discussed before.
What advantages do they have over the other tools that we had mentioned to make marketing cheaper?
Well, these payment tools, or more expensive ones, have some advantages:
Greater reach and visibility. Considerably much older.
Instant results. We can launch these campaigns immediately, without the need for prior work.
In general, they are tools that allow us to achieve a lot of visibility, immediately, in objective segments with which it is not necessary that we have prior contact of any kind.
The problem is usually the price to pay.
Email marketing, lower your online marketing costs and make it more effective. After commenting on the above, we can consider email marketing as an option. Not only to do cheap online marketing, but it also allows us to lower the costs of the other tools discussed.
Now we see how.
Marketing economically
Email marketing is one of the cheapest ways to do online marketing.
For example, if you already have a database of contacts, previous customers who have already bought from you before. If you send them sales emails, and they buy from you again, you will be making a profit without having to re-invest in marketing to capture new leads.
Well, they are clients that you already have.
This is one of the most profitable ways to use your email campaigns.
Of course, this will not always be possible, but even when we cannot send email campaigns to clients we already have, email marketing helps us reduce the cost of other campaigns
Whatever the online marketing strategy we use. All the traffic that we bring to our site will not buy our services or products on the first visit. But if we obtain the email of these visits, we will be able to advance them in the sales funnel more step by step. And it is undoubtedly one of the best ways to optimize the ROI of our investment in online marketing.
Think of all the traffic that comes to our website, wouldn't it be ideal to try to sell to them more than once?
That's what we can do with email marketing, and that's why it's so effective.
More reasons to use email marketing
Another advantage of email marketing over the other economic options mentioned, such as social networks, is that it is fully measurable, down to the detail.
It is possible to know exactly who opens our emails, who clicks. We can even use Google Analytics to create conversion funnels that show us exactly how high our email campaigns generate.
This allows us to really know what is happening with our investment. Something essential when we do not have a large budget to invest in online marketing.
If we take the other options to do cheap marketing, for example, social networks, Twitter for example, the information is not 100% accurate, let's see:
Your Tweets got 12,297 impressions in the last 24 hours
Actually, of these 12,000 impressions, how many people actually saw our messages?
It is difficult to know.
Furthermore, in these cases we are always at the mercy of the decisions made by different social networks, such as the constant reduction of visibility on Facebook.
Even more reasons to use email marketing
Not only what has been mentioned so far makes us see the importance of email marketing for our online marketing.
Especially if we want to do effective marketing. There is more.
As we mentioned a moment ago, it is increasingly difficult to obtain visibility on social networks, due to the number of participants and the noise that is generated.
If we think about advertising (banners, advertisements, etc.) we see that there is more and more rejection by users towards this type of advertising. AdBlockers are used and re-marketing advertising is rejected.
Therefore it is increasingly difficult to keep in touch with potential customers.
Email marketing coupled with content marketing is a very good option to build trust and credibility with potential customers.
In addition to making our investment profitable as we have commented.
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