Small business email marketing: sorted!

Email is still an incredibly effective communications medium for small businesses. It’s a crucial part of my own marketing mix for my online writing business, and for many of my small businesses clients. Email marketing still has massive potential to help you grow your business.

New communications channels like social media are phenomenal for building an online community around your brand, and for interacting in real time with the portion of your customers who choose to engage with businesses through Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. But how many of your customers really do that?

The answer is more every day, and I certainly wouldn’t discourage any business from looking at the benefits of engaging through social media. But think about this for a minute: out of all your customers and potential customers, how many do you think engage with brands on Facebook every day? Now compare that to the number of your customers who check email on a daily basis. Which number do you think is going to be the bigger of the two?

I don’t have figures handy, but intuition suggest that the number of customers checking their email is likely to be SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER. If you’re looking for the lowest common denominator in Internet Marketing… a medium that will allow you to reach the broadest potential cross section of your target market… e-mail is your man.

Using Outlook for your e-mail marketing? STOP!

One of the biggest email marketing mistakes small businesses make is to try and manage their e mail campaigns using Microsoft Outlook’s “Group Mail” facility. This is fine for sending e-mails to groups of colleagues or friends… but it’s not such a great idea for managing your customer email lists. Here’s why:

• No built in list management, subscribe / unsubscribe functionality – which means you have to manage your subscribers manually.
• Makes it tricky to comply with anti-spam legislation, especially in the US, where double opt-in is the norm.
• No effective tracking of open-rates, click-through and other important metrics.
• No automated online archive of messages / campaigns
• No sequential autoresponder / multiple scheduled e-mail facility
• Potential to inadvertently expose your subscribers email addresses to the rest of your list if you forget to use the BCC field.

Luckily, there are effective, affordable web based email marketing solutions that will help automate your list management and make your email marketing both more effective and less of a drain on your limited time and resources.

Affordable, scalable email marketing software for your Small Business

Far better than trying to manage your e-mail lists in your desktop e mail client are any of the web-based email software tools geared specifically towards small to medium sized businesses. Two that I’ve used personally for both my own projects and client campaigns are are AWeber (the preferred email marketing software of Internet Marketers) and Benchmark Email, a fabulous email marketing solution for small to medium businesses.

Both offer an impressive array of features that will help you manage multiple e-mail lists; create striking, high-conversion email campaigns; produce high quality HTML email newsletters and much more besides.

You can sign up for a free 30 day trial of Benchmark Email, and the AWeber trial is just $1, again for 30 days… so there’s practically nothing to lose, and potentially lots to gain, so I’d urge you to give both a try… see which one suits your business best.

One thing’s for sure… once you start to use dedicated email marketing software to manage your campaigns you’ll never look back.