Why Email Marketing? Valuable Tips for SME
Email marketing is a cost-effective and promising marketing tool for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to enter into direct exchange with their customers.
The Benefits of Email Marketing for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises
Your customer data have so much more potential than starting to get dusty in some (digital) folders. Use your data to successfully establish your business on the market and grow the trust of your customers.
Direct marketing in the form of newsletters is an excellent supporter to secure the attention of your customers and work on long-term customer retention. Email marketing allows you to create transparency and strengthen the trust in your brand.
The big advantage of email marketing for SME is the comparatively low cost. While other online marketing measures such as Google Ads require a lot of advertising budget, in email marketing you only pay for the tool. The Return on Investment (short: ROI) also far exceeds other marketing measures. Depending on the industry, this can be up to 53 euros per euro invested.
Email marketing advantages in a nutshell:
- Direct communication with your customers
- Strengthening customer retention
- Winning new subscribers and growing your customer base
- Save time with email marketing automation
- Low cost and effort compared to other marketing operations
- High Return on Invest (ROI)
- Measurability of the achieved success
3 valuable tips on why you should use email marketing as an SME
1. Winning new customers with Newsletter Marketing
When you get started with your business you don’t immediately have a huge customer data base you can use for marketing operations. But that doesn’t mean that fewer email addresses in your email list are bad – on the contrary!
If you have a relatively small email list, it’s easier to manage and get to know your customers. It also gives you the freedom to engage with existing customers on a very personal level and learn from their initial experiences with your email marketing efforts.
You don’t have any subscribers yet? No problem! You just need a little more time and the right approach to successfully collect your first email addresses.
In addition to a newsletter subscription form on your website, offering QR codes at events can also attract new subscribers. Social media are also a good way to grab the attention of new contacts.
By having subscribers confirm their email address (Double-Opt-in) you can be sure that you always act in compliance with the law and that your customers are in fact interested in your business.
By actively collecting new addresses and then directly communicating with them you can turn prospects into customers and make them become loyal fans of your brand.
2. Getting to know your customers better
It pays off to take a look behind the scenes and get to know your customers better by observing their clicking behavior in your newsletters. Tags allow you to find out more about the interests and preferences of your customers. Once you have collected some details, you can send out targeted recommendations and purchase suggestions to your subscribers. The more personalized and individualized your email content is the higher are your chances for conversion, e.g. a purchase.
For example: You send out a newsletter presenting new shoes that have just arrived in your store – sports shoes, hiking boots and sneakers. Attach a tag to each of the pair of shoes. If a subscriber clicks on one of them, this detail is automatically added to your recipient’s dataset.
Use these details to send out targeted emails, e.g. showing more hiking boots to the customer interested in this type of shoes. Or you send out more details on how to take care of their new products (in case they have placed an order in your shop) or any other kind of valuable and relevant information your customer could enjoy.
3. Small effort, big effect: Saving time with email automation
Especially in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) there’s often only one person or a small team responsible for the entire marketing. One thing is particularly important: generating maximum output with the least possible effort.
Email marketing automation is a simple solution for SME to set up automated campaigns. This means: you define a workflow with triggers that trigger certain actions. Once set up, your emails are sent out automatically – and you save an enormous amount of time in your daily work routine.
For example: A customer adds a product to their shopping cart in your online shop – but doesn’t complete their purchase. A simple email automation workflow allows you to send out an abandoned cart reminder without any manual effort and increase your conversion rate.
Email marketing not only offers a cost-effective and efficient direct marketing that can effectively help increase your sales. It is also a very personal communication channel that strengthens customer loyalty more individually than on any other platform.
