Email marketing: the saviour of the SME? |
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| Sales and Marketing | |
| Written by Marc Munier, Commercial Director at Pure360 | |
| Thursday, 21 January 2010 | |
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Email marketing offers the highest marketing return on investment by a wide margin. As we all know the recession has placed a huge amount of pressure on SMEs, and small business leaders have had to make tough decisions on how best to spend their budgets. For many this has meant a reduction in their marketing spend, yet it is vital for SMEs to ensure that they are sufficiently marketing themselves to generate new business and survive these tough financial times. This raises the question of how best can small business leaders ensure they are building brand awareness on an increasingly modest budget?Email marketing is much cheaper to implement than other marketing channels, yet continues to deliver the highest return on investment by a wide margin. An average email costs 0.15 pence to send, giving them a fantastic ROI of 5000%. Email marketing is also less time consuming than organising direct mailings, and provides a higher level of reporting than direct mail, telephone calls and advertising. Online service providers offer SMEs easy to use, affordable email marketing solutions that capitalise on sophisticated technology to deliver highly effective marketing campaigns that are tailored to the specific needs of the various small businesses. These online solutions incorporate some extremely useful tools such as ‘Intelligent Time Sending’, which enables businesses to identify when individual recipients are most likely to respond to their email marketing campaigns by analysing when people have opened, and clicked through, on previous messages. This is an incredibly useful tool as the time of day that you send an email will have a great impact on how many of your recipients read your email. Recent research by my team at Pure360 reveals that contrary to what many marketers believe, people at work are least likely to read a marketing email on their lunch break. The research, entitled ‘Timing is everything’, reveals that people are most perceptive to emails first thing in the morning and the latter part of the afternoon, highlighting the importance of timing when delivering a campaign. Email analysis software can also provide small businesses with valuable information such as how many of their emails were read, how many recipients clicked through to the their website and ultimately how many email reads led to sales. There’s also the added benefit of emails being a lot more environmentally friendly than direct mailings, which are heavy on resources such as paper. One of the most important aspects of effective email marketing for SMEs is gaining access to a suitable database of potential clients. Often it is simply a case of ensuring you are capturing email addresses at your various touch points, be that in a retail environment, on the telephone or on their website. Incentives for signing up to receive newsletters don’t have to be bank breaking in order to generate lots of email addresses through these channels. You can of course buy lists of prospects from list brokers, these work best when used in conjunction with another channel – for example, if an email is sent prior to a telemarketing call the success rate can increase by up to 70% (according to the DMA). There are a great number of reasons why small businesses should take advantage of email marketing; it’s a quick and easy way of communicating with existing customers, as well as attracting prospective ones. This is an incredibly powerful tool that will help SMEs maintain awareness throughout the recession and ensure they are well placed to capitalise on the upturn. ________ Marc Munier is Commercial Director at progressive email marketing provider Pure360. Founded in 2001, Pure360 provides big brands and small companies with the technology, know-how and support to run effective email marketing campaigns that have a measurable, positive impact on business for more information, please visit www.Pure360.com
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