Big data is at the heart of all successful, modern marketing strategies. Companies that engage in email marketing have discovered that big data is particularly effective.
When you are running a data-driven company, you should seriously consider investing in email marketing campaigns. Keep reading to learn more about the benefits.
Data-Driven Companies are Discovering the Benefits of Investing in Email Marketing
Allocating your marketing budget requires you to be careful, especially if you are a small business facing problems in marketing. A great marketing strategy can help you become a part of the big league society. After all, one of the factors that make a brand’s name big is its marketing.
Email marketing has proven to be a great tactic that helps boost your marketing efforts. This is among the most cost-effective methods, busting all the small business myths with regards to time and money. Many believe that emails are a secret weapon only for the big names in the industry. That’s not true. Even the smallest of businesses can use email marketing because of its accessibility and affordability.
Email marketing is even more effective when you use big data to optimize your strategy. There are a lot of reasons that big data can make your email marketing strategy more effective.
You don’t need several thousand dollars if you are using email marketing for your small business. That’s perhaps the true beauty of this method. You can get an even higher ROI if you know how to use data to personalize your content and refine your customer mailing list.
Another reason why emails are a great way to connect with your audience is their importance. Emails have entwined themselves in our lives so much that most people are known to check their emails even before they have gotten out of bed. You don’t want to miss out on this opportunity.
If you are still not convinced about why you should be using email marketing as a data-driven business, below are a few of the many reasons.
- Cost-effective method
When you are a small business, the two biggest constraints that you have are time and money. While looking at your advertisement on a big billboard or on a television or a radio might seem very tempting, it is often quite costly.
If you are considering targeted flyer campaigns where you send flyers to the mailboxes of your prospects, you must also consider the money that you will be paying at the end of the day. The cost of designing, printing, and then mailing these flyers shouldn’t be overlooked; especially when these can cost quite a few dollars.
Such forms of marketing also require your precious time; the time that’s never enough anyway.
That’s where email marketing can do wonders. It’s quite a cost-effective method in terms of both time and money. Crafting an email and sending it to several prospects neither takes long nor does it cost too much.
You also get a chance to directly hit the prospect’s inbox, without spending all that money on the flyers!
You can make sure your email marketing strategy is even more cost-effective by investing in data analytics. You will be able to make sure that you identify the audience that is most likely to convert and provide the highest ROI. This can save you money that would be wasted on advertising to build your mailing list by targeting customers that are not likely to convert.
The best way to do this is by using the conversion reports and audience insights in the analytics dashboards of your email marketing platform. The data here will help you optimize your list-building strategy.
- Establish yourself as an authority
In this world of cutthroat competition, you’ll not be able to participate in the race if you are not perceived as an expert. But the good thing is that email marketing helps you position yourself as an expert, especially in your area of business.
There are two ways for you to do this.
Firstly, share the content that is of value to the customers. Your emails don’t always have to be promotional or talk about discounts. You can share content that’s educational. The best way to do this is by sharing a newsletter, a blog, or maybe video content.
When you send value-added emails to your customers, it makes them understand that you are not just here for selling your product or service. This not only helps build your reputation as an expert but also makes business communications easy.
Secondly, you can try quality blogger outreach. To establish yourself as an authority, you can try guest posting, which is nothing but sharing content related to your business in collaboration with other bloggers on their website. You can add links to your website in these guest posts. This will make it easy for readers to visit your business site if they like what you have shared.
Guest posting allows you to target the blogger’s audience and establish yourself as an authority among that group.
A number of data mining tools make it easier to find quality content on the web, which you can use to optimize your own marketing strategy. You can also use data mining tools like SEMRush to identify the best blogs to submit guest posts.
- Build strong customer relationships
Who doesn’t like to know that someone else is thinking about them? This can be your business for your customers.
When your customers feel that you care or at least you think about them whenever there’s some progress, it makes them feel special. As a result, it can make it easier for you to build strong relationships with them.
Whenever there’s an update, you must share that with your customers. Whether it’s a new product launch, any event that’s coming up, or big news related to your business, you can share it all with your customers.
Of course, if you sit and start calling them individually, it will take hours. Similar is the case with mailouts; they are costly and also a waste. That’s where sending emails can do wonders. Use emails to share more than the news of discounts or sales.
Moreover, if you have invited prospects to sign up for newsletters, you must leverage that fully.
Building customer relationships is a great practice for your business. It helps keep them around for longer than you might have anticipated.
You can build stronger relationships with data-driven CRM applications. As we pointed out in the past, data-driven CRM tools make it easier to build strong relationships with customers.
- Improve brand recognition
Email marketing is a great method to improve your brand’s recall value.
When you strategize well, you will have particular days and time for reaching out to your prospects via emails. When you are continuously sending an email with your name and popping up in their inbox, there will come a day when they will be expecting your emails, or at least they will know from where do they know you.
Secondly, you can always add your logo, brand colors, and graphics in adherence to your brand manual/elements. When you add your brand elements to your emails, it improves your brand’s awareness. Consequently, it boosts brand recognition. This is because if you keep coming across certain elements, again and again, it does create an impact.
Hence, email marketing is not only to let your prospects know about your promotions but also to help them get ready for future interactions.
One of the benefits of email is that it has powerful data-driven AI algorithms that make it easier to automate your engagement with customers. You can specify when emails should be sent out, which makes it easier to remind customers at the right times to keep your brand fresh in their mind without annoying them.
- Increase brand credibility
Increasing your brand’s credibility is perhaps of utmost importance, especially when the competition out there is overflowing.
After all, when you are new, selling your services over those that have been standing their ground for years can get a little tricky. One of the major reasons for your prospects to trust the big names is because of their marketing tactics. They have been hearing that name for much longer than yours. They are bound to get customer’s attention.
With the help of email marketing, you can build connections with your customers. Use this form of marketing to stay in contact and to keep them updated with all the exciting news about your business. Help them grow with your brand.
The more they hear about your business and the more they are aware of your progress, the easier they will find to trust your business over others.
- An additional source of income
Yes, we know you already have a business that’s earning enough. But let’s be real, we all want more.
Several entrepreneurs out there are always in search of ways to make more money than they can invest back into their primary source of income. And email marketing can help you with that, without actually having to spend a penny.
You can use email newsletters to recommend products, services, or affiliates to your customers.
In return, for every sale that the other business makes with your referral, you can earn commissions. Just make sure that you are being genuine and recommending products that you yourself have tried. You don’t want to spoil your reputation just to sell others’ products.
Once you have enough audience, you can sell ‘ad space’ to businesses and earn commissions. Email marketing believes in a give and take relationship, which can turn out to be beautiful if managed well.
- Expand your audience
At the end of the day, we all want to make more sales. And to make more sales, we need more audience.
Sometimes, performing an SEO audit to find practices that will help your website rank better and get in front of more people isn’t enough. You need more than that. That’s where email marketing comes into the picture.
With every visitor that shares an email using your ‘opt-in’ box on the website, you are expanding your database. This database is a true gold mine for you to do everything that we have discussed above. This includes building relationships, sharing knowledge, and improving your brand recall value. You can do this even with those that have only visited your website once and have shared their information.
Just keep in mind that for this to truly become fruitful, you must promote your email newsletter well. This means you must share about your newsletter via social media, on your website, and in your email signature. Basically, wherever and whenever possible. This is because people will only sign up if they know about its existence.
- Track your progress
The best thing about email marketing is all the data that you receive and can analyze. In other forms of marketing, you don’t really know who actually looked at your ads or who skipped them.
With email marketing, you get to know everything that you want to. You get data that talks about who has opened your emails and those who haven’t. From those who have opened it, how many of them replied, what time did they open it, and how many times was your email opened.
You can use this data to tweak your follow-up emails, make them more tempting, and make your subscribers want to open your emails. You can also use this data to understand who is not interested at all. This saves you from sending emails to those doors that you know will never be opened, no matter how many times you knock.
This makes it easy for you to track your progress as well. You can easily run tests, see what’s working and what needs to be changed. Honestly, emails are a blessing in disguise.
This is the most important benefit of big data for email marketing. You will be able to use sophisticated data analytics features to test and optimize your email marketing strategy.
Email Marketing is a Great Option for Data-Driven Companies
Big data has become very important for marketing. One of the best ways companies can use big data to reach new customers and build their brand is with email marketing.
To wrap it up, we can say that email marketing can turn out to be quite beneficial, irrespective of the size of the business. You can use big data to get even more bang for your buck with email marketing. It helps you enjoy the best of all the tactics; from building customer relationships to sharing valuable content, small businesses can use emails as much as large-scale businesses. The best thing about this form of marketing is that you don’t have to spend too much time or money on reaching out to your prospects. Who wouldn’t want that?