Building a business in the digital era cannot be separated from digital marketing activities to support company performance. Most startup businesses nowadays prefer to focus on social media to advertise, carry out promotions, and retain existing customers. It's not wrong, because social media is a place where many people gather virtually and has great potential to carry out digital marketing activities.
However, of course it would be even better if all available resources could be maximized to obtain the best results. Apart from social media, there are several Digital Marketing Channels that can be used to improve marketing performance. One that will be discussed this time is Email Marketing.
Email marketing is indeed quite old when compared to Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok or YouTube. However, even so, email marketing still exists and has many benefits for your business. Before getting to know more about the benefits that can be obtained through email marketing, let's first get to know the meaning of email marketing.
What is email marketing and example?
Email marketing is the activity of sending messages containing promotions, discounts, offers or other commercial information via email with the aim of directing potential customers to make purchases and become loyal customers of a brand.
Email marketing is also part of how to build a digital marketing strategy that is quite effective. Check out the following article, what is email marketing for more information.
Here are some examples of interesting email marketing content ideas as inspiration for businesses:
1. Welcome Email Example
First, there is an example of a marketing email in the form of a welcome. You can give this greeting to customers after they use a service or buy a product. The aim is to provide a welcome to customers.
2. Example of a Product Promotion Email
Next, there is an example of a marketing email that contains product promotions. You can use this if you want to offer promotions to customers and make them interested in making a purchase.
3. Example of a Marketing Email to Commemorate a Certain Day
Certain commemorative days can also be the right moment to send marketing emails. Such as Mother's Day, Independence Day, New Year's Day, or others. You can invite customers to take action on that day.
What businesses benefit the most from email marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing channel that is often used to maximize company performance. Not only for big businesses, email marketing can also be used by novice businesses. If you still feel unsure about starting to use email marketing, you can read the following 8 benefits of email marketing for beginner businesses.
1. Easier to Obtain Customer Data
In building a business, customer data is very important. Through customer data you can conduct research and analyze consumer behavior in order to present more interesting content and develop strategies to achieve certain goals.
Unfortunately, obtaining customer data is not easy, because customer data is confidential and requires permission and the willingness of the person concerned to provide their personal information.
Through email marketing, you can get customer data more easily. You can take advantage of the newsletter subscription feature to get subscribers' email addresses for free.
You can also modify your newsletter form and add fields for name, age and gender to get other information you need. Of course, customers will be more interested in filling out the form you created if there are additional benefits such as discount vouchers.
2. Maintain Relationships with Customers
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) are activities and strategies carried out to retain existing customers so that they become loyal customers and continue to buy your products. For some novice businesses, CRM activities may get less attention because they are considered difficult and require large costs. This is an erroneous assumption.
By using email marketing, you can screen out customers who haven't made a purchase in a long time and send them gift discount vouchers. The email marketing that you send will enter their inbox and have a greater chance of being read directly by your subscribers.
3. Email Design Can Be Customized
Sometimes emails give the impression of being stiff and too monotonous, but that's not the case with email marketing. You can send promotional brochures or catalogs with attractive designs in the body of the email. Also insert a link to your website page so that buyers can easily visit the store by simply clicking on the link you provide.
4. More Personalized
Apart from creating an attractive design that matches your brand character, you can also customize the emails you send to make them more personal. Because email marketing will be immediately received by the intended customer, you can greet them by mentioning their name. Of course, all of this can be set automatically so you don't have to type in their names one by one.
5. Media Survey
In developing a strategy, there are times when you need to conduct a survey to support existing data. However, for start-up businesses, conducting surveys requires a lot of time and money. Meanwhile, hiring third party services may also burden the company's finances.
If your customers meet the required respondent criteria, you can use email marketing to send questionnaires and offer rewards if they are willing to answer the questionnaires you sent.
6. Promotional results are measurable
As a business owner, of course you want to see the results of the strategy you have implemented. Not only social media can provide performance reports on the content you create, with email marketing, you can also measure promotional activities by looking at the open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate and unsubscribe rate. So that you can analyze what needs to be improved or improved from the promotional activities that have been carried out.
If you still feel quite unfamiliar with the metrics and terms in online marketing, please see in full the following digital marketing terms.
7. Track Record Media
Track record media is one of the most important benefits of email marketing, because all promotional activities and conversations with customers will be stored in the email as long as you don't delete it. So that if there is a mistake with a customer, you can use the data recorded in the email marketing to clear up the misunderstanding.
8. Two Way Communication Media
You may already know the benefits of email marketing, but make no mistake, even though social media can be used as a two-way communication medium, email marketing has a slight difference.
Communicating via email often gives a more professional impression than through social media, so by using email marketing you can give a professional impression even though your business is still relatively new.
9. More Cost-Effective
For start-up businesses, cost issues are often the main focus. The company's cash flow is still not very strong and the lack of investor funds forces promotion costs to be made as efficient as possible. Using email marketing as a promotional medium is more cost-effective than printing brochures or placing advertisements in public places.
After all, most people, especially those who are in their productive age, still actively use email every day, so your email marketing opportunities to get a response are still quite large.
Conclusion
So, those are the benefits of email marketing that you can use as a business advantage. Email marketing is a Digital Marketing channel that you can use to improve company performance. Even though your business is still relatively new and small-scale, you can still use email marketing to get maximum profit.
Apart from that, another thing that you should pay attention to in building a business is setting up a website, landing page or at least an e-commerce page to display the products you sell, so that customers who are interested in the email marketing that you send can easily make purchases.