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Email marketing, quite simply put, is the act of sending commercial messages, typically to a group of people using Email. In other words, every email sent to a potential or current customer can be considered email marketing.
It involves using email to send adverts, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing seeks to achieve one or more objectives, i.e., building loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually means sending Emails to enhance the merchant’s relationship with current or previous customers encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business.
Privacy, customization and automation have made email marketing a darling trend. Email gives a personalized connection and shows the recipient that you took time and thought about them. This makes the reader gain some glimmer of interest.
Email marketing is one of the marketing forms entrepreneurs use to get more return on investment from marketing and sales. Research reveals that for every $1 spent on email marketing, you get $38 in return. In addition, the current statistics show over 1.5 billion active email users, which could be potential customers.
Research shows that email marketing campaigns achieve an engagement rate of 22.86% compared to a 0.6% social media engagement rate. Email marketing is one of the most important marketing strategies and forms entrepreneurs should consider to reach the target audience.
Customs through which email marketing works
To know how email marketing works, it’s essential to understand the different aspects of marketing with email. The elements include; subject line, body copy, design, Call-To-Action, relevance, offer, landing page and timing.
Email marketing is essential for small businesses. However, if you opt to start using email marketing to grow your business, it’s necessary to understand how it works.
For email marketing, prospective customers must connect with the business through email addresses.
1. Asking and requesting website visitors.
This requires having an email subscription form that allows visitors to leave their email address details so that you can invite them to subscribe to your email list. In addition, you should be able to explain expectations to visitors upon subscription.
2. Encourage visitors and subscribers to share.
Encouraging website visitors to share and forward the email with others is equally important as having new subscriptions. You can ask website visitors and subscribers to forward email messages to other people. These could include friends, family members, colleagues and associates.
3. Give out offers.
To generate more subscribers, you can send and offer complimentary white papers, e-books, and other resources to new subscribers.
What to consider while choosing the right Email Marketing Software
Choosing the right CRM tool might sound hectic, but you will know the right one for your business with the guidelines below.
1. Make out and recognize your business needs
What do you need? You ought to understand your business needs so you can choose the right email marketing software that fits your profile and portfolio.
2. Identify the tools and the features you want to include
Pointing out the features you need in your software majorly depends on your business needs. However, the common elements across all CRM tools include; marketing automation, lead tracking and management (good for sales and marketing teams), contact management, task management, project management, third-party integration, customer data management, sales management, workflow automation, and many others.
Check your features for customer-centricity, cost, and ease of integration with other tools.
3. Ease of mobility
In the current era of pandemic and technological advancement, everyone has embraced working from home and remotely. Therefore, to keep relationships with customers consistent, teams have to be given access to client information so that they can be able to observe sales pipelines and also perform day-to-day roles remotely. This change in work mode has called for adopting CRM tools that support mobility.
4. The pricing
Price charges are significant for you to know so that you can evaluate whether they fit into your budget. There are free and paid-for CRM software packages, so you can choose the one you want depending on your budget command. Different CRM software charges differently, so you have to be conscious. Some tools give free trial versions though these expire, and you must go in for the paid version to enjoy using the platform.
5. Test drive the software
This is very critical for your business before choosing the right software. If need be, and you don’t understand some aspects, ask for a demonstration session from the expert to show you how the system operates and fix anything you think could be missing.
This would also help you determine how the CRM system can be maintained. You could decide to do a free trial version to test the performance of the software regarding user experience and functionality. This allows you to understand the ease or simplicity of usage regarding tax executions and accomplishments. Therefore, it is advisable that before you go to buy CRM software, request a free version first, use, test, and prove its usability experience.
6. System Integration
This is a vital aspect to consider when choosing the right CRM system. If you buy a CRM system to help you run your business, you may need to integrate the software with other third-party applications for maximum gain. The right CRM should support integrating services like Office 365, Google Workspace integration, ERP, and other software tools.
7. CRM deployment
You are going to choose between cloud-based or on-premise CRM. However, both solutions have positive and negative effects. With a SaaS, you are required to login into the cloud-based CRM of your internet browser. The downside is that internet support is vital but may not be entirely reliable. On the other hand, the on-premise software is physically suited, meaning integration with other software tools might become easy due to straight access; however, mobility is limited.
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