5 Digital Marketing Tips to Get More Customers

Changes in habits and lifestyles usually force changes in digital marketing techniques. With more and more people taking their businesses online because of the global pandemic restrictions, the scramble for customers and patronage is forcing more changes in digital marketing. Many marketers are aware that over 80% of people looking to purchase a product/service resorts to online searches to get what they want. These are prospective customers whose attention digital marketers scramble 24/7 online to get. If you’re looking to reach out to new customers, nurture existing ones and grow your business, you need an effective digital marketing strategy. 

 

Try these here five tips and see how they’ll help your marketing strategy to get more customers.

1. Responsive Website

Customers are not likely to be attracted to a website that is neither attractive to them nor responsive to their needs. Your website is essentially the face of your business in the digital world. It is where you can effectively promote your products/services, attract customers and grow your brand. To do this efficiently, you need a website that is simple, modern, and comprehensive enough to attract customers. It must be secure, user-friendly, mobile-friendly, loads fast and with great aesthetic appeal to respond well to customers. It is advisable to use the services of professional webmasters who know what they are doing to help you create and host a responsive business website you can use to attract customers. DIY is not advisable unless you are a professional in your own right.

2. Effective Marketing Strategy

You cannot have an effective digital marketing strategy without good content. In fact, your content is the most important element you can use to build an effective digital marketing strategy. What this means is that if you want your business to be effective at getting more customers, your content must be in the forefront to help you attract prospective customers. Therefore, you need to continuously create high quality, informative and educational content if you want to have a powerful and effective digital marketing strategy that helps to get customers. To create an engaging content for your business, you must pay good attention to the images, graphics, videos, and written texts on the content. If such content is easily readable, understandable, informative, educational and engaging enough, it helps to get the attention of more and more readers. Getting leads and customers flows from there.

3. Video Ads

People love to watch videos. So, videos are proving to be very effective digital marketing tools.  With popular social media sites like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok streaming billions of videos by the hour, marketers hugely favor videos to run ads and the results are great. When digital marketers add video content to their posts and their marketing strategy, there is usually a significant increase in interactions, website traffic, and sales. That means marketing with video ads is a great idea to get more customers to do business with you.

4. Email marketing

Email marketing is an effective digital marketing strategy to get more customers. Emails allow marketers to market with precise messages to segmented audiences and the results are usually amazing. Nearly everyone around the world has an email address through which most receive digital information and correspondences regularly. This makes email a very powerful and reliable tool that marketers can depend on to easily connect with prospective customers and customers. If you already have a mailing list, you can easily share a variety of marketing info with your prospective customers and customers on that list. You can share your business updates, special promos/offers, price slashes, hot discounts, giveaways and suchlike info that will attract the attention of your audience to your website. If you optimize your emails to include images along with your text, it makes them visually attractive, easily understandable and more able to market your products/services. When effectively done, email marketing can be a very reliable way to get more customers and make more sales.

5. Strong Social Media Presence

Social media is not only hugely popular it also thrives on its influencing capabilities. The reason it is so attractive to digital marketers. For your social media marketing strategy to be effective, you must first figure out exactly which social media platforms you want to use, why you want to use them, and what they can do for your business. This is because all the social media platforms have their own individual peculiarities which may or may not be suitable for your type of business. Once you get your business on social media, it is guaranteed to be widely seen if your marketing is right. That makes it easy to succeed out there to influence others correctly if you market your business correctly. Building a strong social media presence can be a crucial part of the development of your business and can make most of the difference in the long term in your quest to get more customers. A strong social media presence means a strong influencing capability. Aside from paid ads, social media marketing is essentially free. Even with paid ads, marketing on social media is hugely cost-effective and marketers like to take advantage of that as well to get more customers and make more sales.

How to Grow Your Business with Outbound Sales Strategies

If you run your business online, you need a good outbound sales strategy if you want your business to grow. You may face huge challenges figuring out what works and what doesn’t in your marketing activities. That is expected. But, experienced marketers like to advise “using and testing” to determine what strategy works best. Many do recommend a delicate mix between inbound and outbound sales strategies to get the best results.

These here are some tested outbound sales strategies that could have a positive impact on the growth of your own business.

Create Your Ideal Customer Persona

Before developing any marketing strategy, first you must create an ideal customer persona right from the outset. A good customer persona allows you to understand your existing customers and prospects better. With it, you can better curate your content, services, product development and messaging to meet your target audiences' specific demands, behaviors and issues. To create a reliable customer persona, you may choose to directly interview your existing and prospective customers to uncover what they like most about your brand, services and or products. That is in addition to researching your customers’ database to discover trends related to your leads and the customers' behavior towards your content. The info and insights you glean from these exercises will help you to create and ideal customer persona to market to.

Market on Social Media

By way of definition, social media marketing involves the use of social media platforms to promote your brand's product/service. These days, social media appears to be where nearly everyone is at doing their own things around the world 24/7. It is the versatility of social media that business owners leverage on to communicate and engage with customers and reach new audiences. When properly nurtured, it is this audience that can potentially become paying customers. If effectively used, popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram can help business owners to establish great business relationships by helping them to widely share content of value to potential customers.

Generate Quality Leads

Without a doubt, lead generation is by far one of the most effective ways to succeed in outbound sales marketing. For this reason, business owners always need to consciously generate quality leads for their businesses. Lead generation may be a very technical and hugely challenging activity for most marketers but it is worth the while in the long term. Business owners can however reliably use reputable lead generation tools like ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to help them out. If you have already created an ideal customer persona, you can leverage these tools to help look for qualified prospects that could be a great match for your product/service. In addition to this, you can generate quality leads by way of deliberate referral programs technique. These are programs that encourage other people to promote your brand in exchange for some token value for every converted lead.

Be Active in Online Communities

Marketers are gradually discovering that participating and being very active in online communities actually delivers a number of advantages to businesses. Online communities such as forums, internet communities and Facebook groups can be great networks for you to get an overview of your product/service and to evaluate how your customers are relating with your brand. The insights from these communities really help brands to improve their offerings, create better products and build better and stronger brands. In addition, you can take advantage of these online communities to create strong partnerships by taking advantage of networking opportunities with fellow business owners in your industry/business niche. That helps to grow and strengthen your brand. As a direct marketing effort, you can directly promote your product/service by providing quality content to the community and reaching out directly to members that may be interested in what you are selling.

Use Cold Email Marketing

Email marketing is still a very effective marketing strategy if spamming is eliminated. Cold email marketing works best if you can create great quality, and attention-grabbing emails, that are optimized and targeted at a segmented audience. If such mails have attention-grabbing headlines, they entice people into opening the emails and possibly acting on them as well. If you send cold emails, make sure to follow up with your prospects and to track the “open-rate” of the mails using online tools. From your analytics/metrics, you can get insights about prospects that opened your emails and actually visited your website. If such persons did not make any purchase, you can then directly promote your brand to them again through re-targeting ads.

How to Promote Your Service Business Online

If you are a service provider, just like every business owner, your business must have been adversely affected by the general restrictions occasioned by the covid-19 pandemic. What you should worry about now is how to promote your service business to create a better online presence or boost your existing online presence with a view to attracting more customers back to your business. However, the unique nature of service businesses warrants unique business promotion activities and somewhat different marketing strategy simply because services involve intangible products.

If you want to effectively promote your service business online, here are some tips for getting found online.

Create a Blog

Because of the intangible nature of services, every service business thrives on reviews, recommendations or word of mouth. Technically, the trial of a service is often impractical because it is an intangible product. This is why it relies hugely on recommendations to generate trust in its ability to meet the needs of customers. If you create a blog on your website and encourage user-generated content in the form of reviews and articles, it is one effective way to ensure visitors to your website trust and believe in the service you offer. By writing good content on your blog about customers’ experiences with your services, it somehow helps to build the much needed credibility for your business. Continuously writing in-depth, factual, and relevant articles in your blog posts is one great way to sustain customers’ interest in your service business. A good blog does that seamlessly.  

Invest in Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is the key to helping your target market find your service business online. It is what helps search engines to rank your website in their SERPs. If you are offering a service online, because it is intangible, you really need a very good SEO to get noticed online. SEO simply involves a complex set of algorithms created by various search engines to determine the rank of links that address a user’s query. That is what enables search engines to make the highest quality links appear highest in search results. As such, these links get noticed by searchers first and they tend to click on them first in order of priority. That simply translates to higher organic traffic through such high ranked links. Your website benefits from good organic traffic by these efforts. SEO is hugely technical in nature because of its complexity. Because of this, you can only implement a good SEO strategy yourself if you have the knowledge, technical skills, education, experience, and the right SEO software. Alternatively, just like many business owners do, you can hire the services of professional agencies or individual SEO experts to handle SEO for your business website. In terms of costs, doing it yourself is most cost-effective if you know how to.

Use Emails to Market

Email marketing is extremely effective to promote a service business. It is not only cost-effective, it is also very effective to get new customers. By using emails to market newsletters, marketers get better results for their service businesses than marketing on very popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The reason for this effectiveness is simple. Emails are direct, reduce noise, and are guaranteed to reach the intended audience in the form intended. It is however very important to know how to get your potential customers’ email addresses before you can optimize email results. By deliberate efforts, you can build a reliable email list of your customers and potential customers over time. Without this list, the effectiveness of email as a marketing tool is greatly reduced. Marketers can build this list from a combination of existing customer lists, lists obtained by offering webinars and physical meetings, and email lists of potential customers obtained by offering an incentive to them in exchange for their email addresses.

Collaborate with Other Businesses

Many service businesses need some form of synergy to grow. That calls for business collaboration with other businesses. Through faithful friendship and cooperation, a service business can collaborate with another for a mutually beneficial fruitful relationship. The symbiotic nature of this arrangement ensures that both businesses benefit from each other’s audiences without any encroachments. For instance, a logistics business can collaborate with a courier business and they both benefit handsomely from the arrangement. Same way businesses can collaborate and mutually benefit from business networks common to both.

Teach Online Courses

Service business owners can promote their businesses by teaching online courses/ tutorials related their business niche. If you offer such technical online courses/tutorials to your website visitors, and what you offer has high quality, it can help generate a lot of traffic for your business. This traffic comes in two ways for two reasons. The first is that people are always eager to learn, especially if it is free, qualitative and beneficial. Secondly, free courses and tutorials help to build some form of rapport with customers even before you offer your services to them. From these efforts, you can arouse the curiosity of your consumers. Next is to make your sales pitches and make your sales. Businesses operating professional services online can do so effectively by offering free apps, free software, or other types of training as a way to demonstrate their proficiency and to garner new customers. Free apps offers and the training to use the apps effectively can often lead users to purchase the apps. That is good business.

7 Proven Ways to Grow Your Service Business Online

Service businesses are now taking very prominent places online just like many other businesses. Many are still coming into the market daily thereby making the industry seriously competitive. Since everyone is struggling for space and attention to do profitable service business, businesses are always in search of viable ways to do better business. Online marketing is one of the best strategies service businesses can use to improve on their services and do better business. By engaging the best digital marketing tools and strategies, service businesses can better reach their clients/customers and be able to manage them better. That translates to more and better business.

Here are seven proven ways you can rely on to grow your service business online.

1. Know Your Target Clients/Customers

No doubt you know the service you are rendering. By knowing your clients/customers, you can serve them better. Knowing your clients/customers well enables you to draft and send the right marketing messages online. If you are able to define them well enough, know their needs through certain characteristics, features, and other salient facts about them, you then determine how your service business will fit them. The better you know them, the easier you’ll find it to reach out to them, with the right marketing messages, through the right channels and the right way.

2. Have a Well-Hosted Website

It may surprise you to know that these days, when people want to look for a service business to engage, their first point of call is usually the internet. They first search online for local service businesses near them or in their locality. That is the reason an authoritative website comes handy.  Such website helps to provide online, your detailed service business information which includes the types of service(s) you offer, how you offer them and any other useful content information. The website helps to support your brand, reinforce it and grow it online by providing a smooth and intuitive user experience to all visitors. That is good for business no doubt.

3. Build Your Brand

Most online marketers are always in the business of building their brands in perpetuity. Service businesses are no exceptions. Fact is, there are thousands of service businesses competing for attention online and your potential clients/customers know this. They know they always have lots of these businesses to choose from. That is why you must always stand ready to provide strong reasons why your brand is preferable to others. Doing so helps to secure good patronage for your brand if you position it well enough. So, you must consciously build your brand online. Building your brand simply means familiarizing your potential customers with your business as distinct from all others in its niche. If your service business is well branded, that will help to distinguish it from the other service businesses. Good branding helps to give your service business a friendlier, more recognizable and memorable outlook. Online, you can better help that by choosing unique brand colors, logos and fonts for your website displays and content. Somehow, these help to enhance your online presence by creating a consistent image for the consumers of your service to see and easily remember.
 
4. Create a Blog

Every service business needs a quality blog for the sole purpose of attracting more potential customers to its website. Marketers have discovered that blogging is one of the most important segments of a successful content marketing strategy. It helps to attract the much needed organic traffic to the website. So, if as a service business marketer you want to attract organic traffic to your website, all you need do is to create a quality blog. Regularly populating the blog with educational, informative and even entertaining content is one great way to grow its readership. You can through your blog answer trending and burning questions, become an authoritative resource for service delivery information to interest and excite your customers and potential customers. Marketers that are able to use their blogs to discuss versatile topics, share useful info about their business niche, publish tutorials, how-to posts, tips and tricks posts, case studies, statistics reports, and similar informative content tend to get a very good online attention and exposure. That helps with good organic traffic and increased business.

5. Get on Social Media

These days, the power of social media is no longer in dispute when it comes to promoting a business and reaching out to new clients/customers. Aside the huge popularity and ease of use of many social media platforms, they also offer different unique options to businesses. Your task as a service business marketer is to carefully search for and choose which social media platforms your target clients/customers are most likely to use. That is where you can successfully pitch for them to get the best results. For a growing service business, it is best to consider the most popular of these platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and Instagram. You can easily use these platforms to promote your website, blog content, promote your services, introduce your team, personalize your business, communicate/interact with your clients/customers directly, and monitor their interest in your business. Smart marketers can use social media to have a direct link to potential clients/customers and an opportunity to show them why it is always a great idea to choose their service business.

6. Monitor Your Competitors

Whatever service you are rendering online, always have in mind that there are probably thousands of others out there doing about the same things. To get noticed from this crowd, you must invest in a strong online presence through a deliberate online marketing strategy. Even if most of your competitors may be doing the same things, if you do these same things differently, it can give an edge. You can only get that edge if you endeavor to monitor very well what your competitors are doing and how they are doing it. From the information you gather from these efforts, you can design your own unique strategies to help stand your business out distinctly from the rest of them. That is what helps to give your service business an edge. You can easily monitor the activities of your known competitors from what they do on their websites, social media handles, their blog content, their types and channels of communication, their promos, pricing, guarantees/warranties and from any other online activities of theirs you can easily monitor.

7. Market with Email

Email marketing may be “old school” but, it is still a great strategy to promote a service business. Email marketing is particularly very effective to specially market to segmented audiences, creating and building brand awareness as well as increased customer engagement. Emails are great for breaking news, announcing new business additions, promos, sending newsletters, e-books, and price adjustments to specific audiences. Emails allow marketers to send personalized marketing messages that tend to make recipients of such messages feel like the marketer is writing to them specially. Many of such personalized messages usually get the desired results for the business.

Low Cost Marketing Tips for Low-Budget Businesses

Many small businesses are always constrained by their marketing budgets. Even at that, many operate on extremely low budgets and they still get results. That comes about because of the skills and techniques the business owners choose to deploy in their marketing activities. Since traditional marketing methods are hugely expensive, digital marketing techniques deployed with skills come in very handy. Many of these techniques are budget-friendly, cheaper and cost-effective. These, here marketing tips are not only low cost to implement, they help to get good results as well.

Build Customer Loyalty: Every marketing campaign revolves mainly around customers. That is, getting new customers and retaining old ones to keep your business growing. That is why business owners must always explore any and every way to cultivate a very good relationship with customers. One of such ways is to use loyalty programs to motivate customers to keep them coming back to do repeat business with you. You can reward customers with gifts, discounts on repeat purchases, discount coupons etc. etc. all in a bid to establish an emotional bond with them. Customers usually reciprocate such efforts with sustained loyalty.
 
Become a Speaker on Demand: If you have the knowledge and requisite skills, you can always seize every opportunity to speak about your business and its niche. You can offer to speak at trade shows, exhibitions and industry association meetings to make yourself known as an expert in the industry. Alternatively, you can choose to organize your own speaking events and do webinars to attract patronage to your business.

Share Quality Content: If you write high quality and informative content, sharing it should not be much of a headache. The internet is awash with free tools to distribute content very widely. You can always choose which of these tools is the best suitable for your type of business. Either for free or at minimal amount of money, you can use free news services channels such as PRWeb.com, i-Newswire.com, Mininova.org and TheFreeLibrary.com to share your content online.

Build a Reliable Sales Team: Every business needs a team of super salespeople to survive. When all members of the team are positively driven and they share in the business goals, the results are amazing. Such teams help the business with unlimited promotions even by their conducts, mannerisms and general behavior as well as running the systems smoothly, effectively and efficiently.  This is why the business owner must endeavor to train and prepare all his employees to be expert marketers of the brand.

Conduct Quality Surveys: It is through quality surveys marketers derive reliable and dependable info to prepare sales pitches. Business owners can simply conduct opinion polls to gather very useful marketing information from the field. By asking consumers direct questions about what issues or topics are of importance to them, you can use the results in your blog content or other articles you publish elsewhere. That is one very effective way to get out vital information about your business such as what the business offers, what is new in the stores and what promos are ongoing.

Specialize and Specialize: You must go to great lengths to be very good in and be known for what you do. You must specialize and be special in what you do. That is what stands you out from the crowd. Always go for the best quality product/service and be sure you always do it well. If you promise customers something special, be sure it is really special. The icing on the cake is if you manage to gain the recognition of some institution or association that endorses your business as a prestigious business in your local area. That helps to give the business some valuable mileage of free publicity.

Reward Referrals: Human beings love rewards no matter how token. If you promise to reward referrals, people take up the offer and you get more referrals. In a restaurant for instance, offering one free meal (subject to a limit in cost though) for every two meals paid for is a very good incentive. Discount coupons are also good for certain referrals.

Create a Blog: Blogging has become a perfect avenue for business owners to share high quality and informative content. It is a highly valuable marketing resource. Business owners can create blogs freely on blog sites such as Wordpress.com or Blogger.com. A blog provides business owners the perfect space to write comments related their businesses. You can also invite as guest bloggers people that have huge online reputation. The popularity of their blogs helps your brand reputation immensely.

Leverage Your Resources: Your email list, social media accounts, social media friends/followers, business associations and even your regular correspondence are great assets you can leverage on to advertise. Letterheads and email signature boxes are very good avenues to advertise your business. Leverage on them all. Offer new promos and price adjustments on your blog and other correspondences. Be sure there is a link back to your website/blog to allow your content users easily have access to what is new and on offer.

Tap Ideas from Your Customers: If you do not have customers, you cannot have a business. That says a lot about how important they are to your business. You can invite your consumers to contribute their comments and recommendations to help you improve on your service to them. Such comments can be on any aspect of your business, be it packaging, quality, design, service delivery, ads campaigns and so on. You can invite them to contribute ideas on how to develop new or better channels to keep your business in touch with them and to win more customers. You can reward any such useful contributions with token gifts and or special discounts.

Cultivate Strategic Alliances: Yes indeed! Every business needs strategic alliances to survive. You can study and investigate what other businesses are doing better than you are. If you are in the same business niche, you can explore the possibility of creating a partnership and better synergy to serve the market better. Explore the possibility of your products serving as upselling products to some other well-serviced business. That way, their success will help push up your own success.

Promote Yourself with Business Articles: Write articles relating to your business for publication in newspapers and magazines specializing in same business niche. That helps to establish your authority and reputation in the industry/niche. The more popular you are, the more your business will be in demand.

Seize Every Opportunity to Advertise: Smart marketers never fail to seize any business opportunity to advertise their businesses. As a local business owner, be sure to take part in popular community services and self-help projects. Participating in competitions sponsored by the media, associations and institutions is an effective and cheap avenue to promote your brand very widely. If there is a local derby or sports activity going on in your local community, do not fail to seize the opportunity to advertise your business. Generously handing out handbills and even business cards in a local popular activity is one great way to advertise your business very cheaply.

Create and Share Sales Videos: Marketing videos are gradually becoming better materials for advertising. With a simple VCR, you can create short marketing videos to promote your business. For wider publicity, you can upload these videos free on YouTube, Google Video, and any other sites. The results from these efforts are usually very encouraging for marketers.

Publish Stories about Your Business: Never miss any opportunity to chronicle and publish milestone achievements about your business. If there is any important event happening around your business, make sure to write something about it and have it published either as a newsletter or as free newspaper article. If a newspaper, magazine or website carries your published article, they can give you direct credit and even a link to your business. That is very good publicity for your business. 

 
Be Active on Social Media: These days, social media is where nearly everyone is at doing one thing or another mostly social. Smart business owners are taking advantage of that. If you create a business profile in any of the most popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, you can post quality content consistently and regularly to build  huge following/friends. That becomes a very good audience you can segment and market to directly free of cost.

Take Good Advantage of the Internet: Business owners should always take maximum advantage of the use of the internet. The internet means different things to different people but how it is used is what matters most. Among many other uses, business owners can take deliberate steps to include their business websites on free sites that help them to get traffic. Websites like Delicious.com, Digg.com and Squidoo.com are very good at this. No smart business owner passes up any opportunity to promote his business. Anywhere on the internet where you can do so at little or no costs at all is highly recommended.

Deliberately Hunt for Customers: It is not smart for a business owner to open up a business and keep a lid on it. If no one knows about your business, no one patronizes it. If is very smart therefore for business owners to go out and deliberately hunt for customers. That is what aggressive business promotion aims to achieve. You can woo customers with gifts, promos, discounts, price slashes, improved and better products and better service.

Take Advantage of your Business Location: Location matters a great deal in the quest for businesses to get customers. Be sure your business is well located for easy access and patronage by your customers. When your store is obscure and difficult to reach, it gets less patronage. Storefront signs and directions to your business location help a great deal to get customers. On the internet, optimizing your business website for local searches is usually very helpful.

Market with Emails: Marketing with emails is not only cheap and cost-effective it gets good results as well. But first, you have to build a credible email list before starting an email marketing campaign. If you segment your email list based on shopping habits and buying patterns of your consumers, you can design emails with offers and promotions tailored to each one. You get better results that way.

5 Business-Boosting Digital Marketing Tips

No matter how experienced you are in digital marketing business, you still need digital marketing tips to boost your business. Digital marketing is an ever-evolving business in tandem with the deepening of the internet and the advancement in digital technologies. Some new strategies and tactics still emerge from time to time that serious digital marketers must keep abreast with. Digital marketers always look for great opportunities to boost their businesses. Some of these ways include changing their business models, marketing strategies, and adapting their businesses to the changes in consumer-behavior and shopping.

These here, digital marketing tips and tricks, are very handy in all these.

1. Have a Marketing Plan

You cannot have a good traction in digital marketing without a plan. Without a good plan, you may end up expending valuable time and money into marketing strategies that may not deliver good results. First, you must spare time to draft a detailed marketing plan to drive your business forward. This plan will emanate from a thorough market research of your business niche, your competition, challenges, opportunities, environmental threats, and changing technologies particularly Artificial Intelligence, AI, the economy and consumer behavior. The comprehensive insights gleaned from these sources will help you to design and build a strategic plan to meet your marketing goals.

2. Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing may be “old school” marketing strategy but it is still hugely effective. To derive maximum benefit from email marketing, you must first build a credible email list over time. With the list in place, you can begin to send regular emails to the segmented list to boost your business. Doing so allows a marketer to target specific subscribers with communication they’ll find valuable. Such messages elicit better responses/results from the email subscribers. Even if you are looking to promote a new product/service or you are running a promo/competition, or even if you are just creating useful content for your customers, an email campaign helps you to reach your goals better and faster than many other digital marketing methods.

3. Create a Captivating Landing Page

The landing page of your website is the first port of call where online surfers first come in contact with your business. That is why it must be attractive and captivating enough to arrest their attention. What your landing page looks like is usually a key element of your digital marketing strategy. For this reason, marketers must ensure the landing pages of their websites contain very strong headlines, interesting GIFs, attractive products photos, a CTA, Call-To-Action button and a content body that strongly motivates visitors to make a purchase. It is with such an engaging and enticing landing page that allows the marketer to make better impact and sell well online.

4. Invite Testimonials/Reviews

Many digital marketers now know that there is a very strong correlation between the number of positive reviews and sales. The reason they can no longer afford to underestimate the power of recommendations to boost business. Reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers act in many ways to support the quality and suitability of products on sale to prospective buyers. Many buyers even make their buy decisions based on product reviews. It is smart marketing therefore, to if convenient, directly invite reviews after making a sale. Doing so helps marketers in very many beneficial ways to boost their businesses because products with positive reviews usually outperform products lacking reviews. Good reviews must however not be forced out of, or coerced from customers. It should always be a voluntary and free will thing.

5. Take Advantage of Social Media

Because of the huge popularity of social media, it has become a very effective tool for marketing businesses no matter the size of the business. Social media marketing is cheap, affordable, and easy to use for most digital marketers. You can directly target specific demographics with promos and campaigns on social media. Marketing info on social media can easily go viral within a very short while.  If you effectively combine social media and other digital strategies in your marketing plan, the results can be very quick and hugely encouraging. What matters most however if you want to market on social media is to be sure to always create valuable content for sharing on a consistent basis. If posting valuable content on social media frequently is too demanding on your time, you can take advantage of automation tools to help save time. These tools can release your posts at programmed scheduled intervals. Some of these automation tools can also provide key marketing metrics that help you to improve on the performance of your promotional efforts.

5 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies that Get Quick Results

Digital marketing appears to be growing and deepening in tandem with the internet. For digital marketers to get quick results and remain relevant it is of huge importance for them to make sure they plan their inbound digital marketing strategy very well. What they really need is a budget-friendly digital marketing strategy that works for their customers. If well designed and effective, digital marketing can be relatively low cost to implement even while offering high returns on investment. For this reason, marketers must always try to understand exactly where their businesses fit in the market. That is key to the success of any digital marketing strategy they may choose to adopt. For your own digital marketing journey, I like to recommend you try the following strategies if you want quick results.

 

1. Market with Captivating Online Ads

This is a given. The more captivating your ads, the more traffic they attract and the more clicks they get. If you want to succeed as a digital marketer, it is very important for you to ensure your online ads stand out from the hugely competitive crowd. This is in addition to ensuring your ads are at all times relevant to your audience. This you can do by making sure your ad texts are optimized for your chosen keywords in addition to their aesthetic and attractive designs, particularly banners. Using the right language and vocabulary that your audience understands adds to the appeal and effectiveness of your ads. For best results, marketers must always have a good understanding of the audience they are targeting, why they are targeting them, the stage they are in the buying cycle and exactly what type of message that can affect them the most.

2. Consistently Write Engaging Blog Content

Blogging is one of the cheapest and most effective forms of content marketing available to digital marketers online. If your blog is authoritative, informative and educational, it easily attracts loyal readers. That translates to regular traffic to your website. Marketers use their informative blogs to enhance the knowledge that customers have about the products they are marketing. That knowledge helps to build brand authority and popularity for marketers. The more and consistent a marketer writes good content, the more popular his brand becomes. If the content a marketer consistently writes is SEO-friendly, search engines help people searching for related information to that website. That translates to very valuable organic traffic.

3. Market with Social Media

Social media is increasingly becoming indispensable to digital marketers because of the huge popularity of the platforms. With nearly 4 billion users around the world, social media is now the ideal place to market for most digital marketers. Now without a doubt, that is quite a huge market. Depending on the product/service you are marketing, marketers have a host of social media platforms available to them. They always have available to them many different social media platforms from which to choose. What matters most is to be sure to choose and work with such platforms where your targeted audience hangs out. That is the right place to engage them. This engagement can be very crucial in building brand recognition and loyalty. Brand recognition results from your marketing messages getting the desired results and more. Social media platforms most popular with marketers are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok. They all have their individual peculiarities, advantages and restrictions though. Marketers always choose which is best suitable for their type of business and which helps them to get the best results.

4. Engage with Email Marketing

Effective communication is inseparable from digital marketing. Marketers use good communication to push products, engage with customers, prospect new customers, get leads and make sales. Communicating by email is usually a preferred choice for marketers who genuinely want to build engagement. This is because email is cost-effective, super quick and quite convenient for marketers to reach out easily to a very large audience that can even be in the range of hundreds of thousands just by pressing a computer button. Once a marketer builds up a credible email-marketing list over time, periodically reaching out to everyone on this list with all forms of marketing messages becomes relatively easy.

5. Efficiently Track and Measure Inbound Traffic

It is very difficult for marketers to gauge the performance of their marketing campaigns without efficient tracking and measurements. That is where online analytics tools become very handy. With these tools, particularly free Google Analytics tools, marketers can easily find out what sources are driving visitors and the webpages that are most popular with searchers. Marketers get insights into what sources web searchers used to find their websites. They get information about how long they stayed where on the site and what they looked at while there. They get information about what kind/types of smart devices through which visitors accessed their webpages. This information helps marketers to rejig or redesign their marketing strategies and provides lots of historic information against which to benchmark the future performance of their marketing campaigns.

How to Create a Data-Driven Email Marketing Strategy

Every effective email marketing strategy derives from and thrives on customer-data. This data provides the information that helps email marketers to drive sales and to know whether or not if they are selling the right products to the right audience. If you are in digital marketing, chances are, you are already sending emails to your customers with products you have on offer. If you have accurate customer data, you can make your emails more specific, targeted, and data-driven. Doing so helps to boost both traffic and sales for your business. Traditionally, marketing emails have always been an excellent medium to communicate with customers. By using customer data to learn more about your customers, you can provide them with the right email content and offers they like. That is one great way to keep them happy and loyal to your brand. One very good move for your marketing business no doubt.

Find below some recommended actions you can take to create an effective data-driven email marketing strategy for your business.

Consider Your Audience First

In digital marketing, the audience is key. It is just not enough to know what you are selling, but also who you are selling it to. That is your audience of customers and potential customers. If you have accurate audience demographics, it can make a huge difference as to how your product is received in the market, and how well it will sell. Marketers need customer data to help them figure out buyers’ demographics and who is buying what. Useful marketing demographics may include a person’s age, education, hobbies, tastes, job, gender, geographical location, language, culture, amongst others. If a marketer puts demographics into consideration, he/she can create more targeted emails for specific demographics. Such emails tend to get a much higher response rate, leads and sales.

Get the Timings Right

In digital marketing, it is not enough to market right, you must also endeavor to time your messages right for best results. Bad timing can kill the best of marketing initiatives and even ads. No matter how good your marketing emails are, once the timing is off, they’ll never get the best results. For this reason, when you are creating your email marketing strategy, you must get your timing right. Exactly at what time of the day do you need to get your emails out to be sure a good percentage of your recipients will open them, read them and possibly act on them? This is hugely important to the results you get.

Use Traditional Marketing Methods

The good part of traditional marketing methods is that they still get good results. They are very flexible and allow you to experiment to determine what works and what doesn’t. By using “traditional” methods of marketing particularly A/B testing, it is possible for a marketer to try one method and, if it doesn’t get the desired response, he/she can try another to determine which gets better results. That way, marketers can always try different methods to find out if a marketing idea is working. With Artificial Intelligence, AI now in use by marketers, if they have to experiment with several options, AI helps to make the process much faster and accurate.

Understand Your Audience

The best way to understand your audience is to, directly ask them their likes and dislikes. This you can do by sending out emails they can respond to. That gives them the chance to tell you what they like. If you understand your audience well enough, you can create effective emails to enable you market to them successfully. Even if a certain audience fits into same kind of demographics, it does not really mean they will all like the same things. Therefore, even within the same demographics, you can go a bit more personal to get a better and deeper understanding of the audience. Emails that appeal to this personal information are more likely to get better attention and more clicks.

Keep Your Customers Involved

Digital marketing is all about satisfying customers by meeting their needs. No marketer can guarantee that customers will love everything they offer all of the time. The reason is, there will always be those people who are more enthusiastic about your products than others are. Some will be more loyal to your business than others will. Successful marketing therefore will be to try to win back those customers who are less involved with your business. These are the type of customers you need to market to more by engaging them more. Marketers can now use AI to analyze customer data better and more accurately. The data helps them to keep an eye on dormant and lagging customers. You can get such customers to do better if you send them personalized emails regularly. Chances are, such emails will encourage them to shop more with you, and could prevent them from unsubscribing completely from your business.

Upsell at Every Opportunity

Smart marketers are very adept at upselling. Upselling is selling add-ons to customers to enhance their shopping experience. It is a way of selling items to customers they did not originally set out to buy. For instance, you can upsell seat covers and some other accessories to a customer who buys a car from you. In email marketing, customer data can provide the details needed to upsell products customers are very likely to buy. Marketers always take advantage of that to do some upselling.

Understand Predictive Analytics

Email marketing is mostly about prospecting online. It thrives on permutations and predictions hence the need for predictive analytics. Predictive analytics is all about looking at customer data and making predictions based on it. With it, marketers can successfully create targeted ads and emails by analyzing their buyers’ behavior and interests. These predictions come from analyzing browsing behavior or past purchases of customers, as well as their social media interactions and email engagements. For quicker customer data gathering and analysis, marketers now depend hugely on AI, machine learning, and algorithms that have a particular impact on predictive analysis. With them, marketers can also evaluate customer profiles and buying patterns better. That helps marketers to create more successful marketing strategies and campaigns.

 

Figure Out Customer Response Points

Just as all customers as individuals are separate from one another, so they all have separate individual points that they respond to. By using the right data, marketers can easily see the areas their customers are reacting to. That enables marketers to specially create and tailor emails depending on the customer preferences. Creating a marketing strategy that capitalizes on people’s preferences like this is one a great and very effective way to utilize both demographics and personal information to get good results.

Make Your Responses Personal to Customers

Yeah, most people like to feel and be treated very importantly. Customers are no exceptions to this human craving. Smart marketers make a point about this in responding to the customer’s behavior, with actions that tend to boost their ego and make them happy. By studying, analyzing and following personal customer data, you can respond better and more directly to these behaviors. That is one very effective way to reach out better to them with a view to getting better results out of their responses. For instance, by using AI, you can pinpoint the areas that customers keep looking at on your website. If such customers are yet to make a purchase from you, you can use this info to send emails to them with products relating to this topic and inviting them to buy. This is one great way of predicting your customer’s needs before they even know them. By doing this, you are also providing great customer service as well. This can go a long way to encourage your customers to keep coming back to do business with you.  

How Artificial Intelligence Helps Your Digital Marketing Business

Digital marketers have come to accept Artificial Intelligence, AI, as very useful in digital marketing. Worldwide, the real use of AI is something many have been toying with since the advent of computers themselves. Across very many industries, the uses of AI differ very widely. However, what is generally known about AI is that it helps with better efficiency particularly in the use of time and resources. The uses of AI in digital marketing are many and varied. Marketers generally agree that AI is generally helpful in digital marketing business provided it is appropriately used.  Find below some of the most beneficial uses for AI in digital marketing as generally acclaimed by many experienced digital marketers.

Content Creation

In digital marketing, content is king. Good content is informative, educating and even entertaining. These qualities tend to attract readers to good content. The more of such good content a marketer generates, the more readers are attracted to his business. That is where AI becomes hugely important. AI can write entire pieces of content for marketers looking to increase engagement and broaden their digital presence. With only a vague brief provided, AI can write insightful, detailed and, at times very complex content that is of high quality. This can be done with very smart machines (robots mostly) technically programmed for such. It is at times very difficult to distinguish what these robots can do from what humans do directly and these machines have the added advantage of producing much more good content within the same time frame than human efforts. So, when marketers are confronted with any content job that is time-intensive, and requires continuous augmentation in order to prove valuable for brands, artificially written content is always a preferred choice for marketers in such circumstances.

Social Media Marketing

Worldwide, nearly everyone now seems to be on social media. Marketers have since latched onto that fact to market very widely on social media. As lucrative as social media is for digital marketing, it is way beyond the scope of any one person to bestride completely in their marketing efforts. It is virtually impracticable for marketers to realize the full potential of social media in accessing the full extent of their target market, without the use of some intelligent, data-sorting tools. These tools help marketers to cut through most of the noise and hassles to better position themselves to get more marketing traction from social media. Digital marketers now deploy AI for more complex, customers/leads targeting purposes. Specifically, AI is now of great use on social media for the creation of posts, monitoring live campaigns and gathering marketing intelligence. Marketers now deploy AI on popular social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and others to harness the huge marketing benefits derivable form their very huge user bases that is in the range of billions of active users around the world 24/7. Now, that’s quite a market!

Email Messaging

Among very experienced digital marketers, email messaging remains one of the most efficient ways of reaching out quickly to an engaged audience en masse. It is cost-effective to boot. Even with the use of emails, when marketers want to market to a large and diverse list of subscribers, it is time-consuming and not even as cost-effective as expected. That is where AI comes handy in the form of software for marketing automation. For example, MailChimp now has in its stable some very effective AI tools for email marketing automation. These are tools that can send emails directly to whom they are targeted at the right times and intervals and gather intelligence feedback for the marketer. Such AI tools help digital marketers to track and efficiently sort data gathered directly from the results of every email outreach and issuing ROI reports from the efforts. Pretty smart no doubt! That is how AI tools help marketers to deploy cutting edge and modern digital marketing techniques for great results in this age and time.

How to Get Email Marketing Right to Create Brand Awareness

Do you still want to get introduced to email marketing? Pay attention to the following. Email marketing is a digital marketing method that lets you personalize communication for customers. It allows you to promote your products and services as well as keep in regular touch with customers, both new and existing. It is a mass-appeal, digital communications method that is very popular with marketers. It always gets very impressive results even at minimal costs outlay if properly used.

For effective marketing purposes, email lets you segment your email contacts and personalize content per the needs of your target audience. Personalization can be via any way that delights your customers. Such as, catchy headlines, clear calls to action, personalized recommendations, discount coupons, exclusive mobile-only offers, and lots more.

Even if you’re new to email marketing or you are a veteran in the business, it pays to follow these simple tips to run a successful email campaign to get good results.

1. Never bombard your customers with emails. Too many unsolicited emails can make your subscribers to unsubscribe or many of the mails even ending up as spam. Always choose a frequency that neither overwhelms your subscribers nor hurts engagement for your business.

2. Track the results of your email campaigns diligently with online tools. With these tools, you can get to know how many subscribers opened your email, how many clicked on the hyperlinks and so on.

3. You must study, research and understand the needs of your customers before sending mails to them. If you do, you can then customize your email content to match their needs. That is what gets the best results.

4. Be sure to always obtain your customers’ consent before sending them any email. Make the right provisions for them to sign up themselves. Do not fail or neglect to provide a subscription form on your website where customers can voluntarily submit their email addresses to add in your very vital email list.

Top Digital Marketing Strategies for a Restrained Market

 

Year in year out, digital marketing strategies tend to change because of new trends and innovations that emerge, as customer needs, behaviors and demands change. That is further complicated when the market is restrained by both predictable and unpredictable factors such like the covid-19 restrictions the world is now experiencing. In such a complex situation, better planning and more effective marketing strategies tend to be the right recourse for smart marketers. Find below some of the strategies expert marketers like to employ to help their businesses survive in a severely restrained market.

Content Marketing

In digital marketing, content remains king. When your content is good, your business tends to receive good organic traffic as a result. Good content is vital for promoting your brand/product and for creating awareness and brand authority. In today’s digital marketing world it is not only written content that is important and can serve as good content. That is the category good blogs belong. Video content and infographics are also very effective content now most commonly used formats in content marketing. However, what matters most is the quality of the content. Once the quality is good, it helps to attract more traffic, improve customer engagement and user experience. With increased traffic to your business website, your business benefits directly from more leads and increased sales.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO

SEO remains indispensable to digital marketing and it is still as important as ever. In a severely restrained environment, what makes the real difference in how your business is found among millions of others online, is how good your SEO is. With the correct use of keywords in written content, photos, graphics and videos, you get your business optimized for better search results. That can make the real difference between success and failure in digital marketing. Even if the market is restrained, when more users discover they are able to easily make searches with images and videos, optimizing these items for that purpose is good for business.

Social Media Marketing

When people encounter any form of restrictions, they tend to spend more time at home and online. That automatically means spending more time on social media and engagement with businesses online. Smart digital marketers always cash in on that. Such scenario gives marketers very good opportunities to market to, engage with new audiences and re-engage with existing customers particularly on social media. That ultimately results in good customer retention and better sales.

Pay-Per-Click, PPC Advertising

PPC advertising in digital marketing involves a better and more effective use of ads budgets. Of course, when the business environment is restrained, demand goes down and many businesses struggle. It becomes imperative therefore to use and manage ads budgets better for business survival. With PPC ads, you do not necessarily have to scale down your ads efforts. Such ads help you to manage resources better since you only pay for clicks your business receives thereby helping to prevent wasteful dissipation of scarce resources chasing elusive traffic. That helps the bottom line of your business.
 
Email Marketing

If you consider costs and effectiveness side by side, email is very useful in digital marketing even in restrained circumstances. That is why email is hugely popular with digital marketers. It gets good results even with very limited resources outlay. Email remains one of the mainstays of effective digital marketing strategies and it promises to remain so into the foreseeable future. Among the many strategies expert marketers prefer, email tends to deliver about the highest return on investment. That is aside its immense popularity among digital marketers. In the customer-centrist market marketers now find themselves operating in, the best areas of investment tend to be on personalization strategies. These strategies are most effective to engage and nurture both new customers and existing customers even in restrained circumstances. Email marketing automation helps to make personalized campaigns easier to implement and manage at considerably reduced costs. That is good for business.

Tested and Effective Internet Marketing Strategies to Stimulate Business Growth

As you may have noticed, the online and digital marketing terrain keeps undergoing continuous changes. These changes at times pose very huge challenges to marketers. To survive as a marketer therefore, you must develop the capacity to design, initiate and implement new techniques peculiar to your type of business. These techniques can help your business be efficient and competitive in a hugely competitive market space. Here are some simple techniques you can try out immediately for good results in terms of stimulating a measurable business growth in your business.

User-Friendly Website Design

Your website is your business window in the huge virtual space of digital marketing. It must be well designed and user-friendly to serve that purpose adequately. Ideally, business websites are expected to play very crucial roles in any online marketing effort. This is because it is only through websites people can locate your business online and patronize your products/services anywhere they are in the world. For this reason, having a user-friendly and aesthetically designed website is what helps your business to attract the right online audience and somehow motivates them to respond to your call-to-action to do business with you. It is to it many will return later for repeat business if their onsite experience on your website was pleasing and satisfying to them. So, if you can design a device and user-friendly website for mobile devices particularly smartphones as well as computers, your audience will find it easier to access it and navigate through it to do business with you.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO

To make your website visible to search engines, you need search engine optimization, SEO. With a good SEO, search engines will rank your website high in their SERPs. That is good for organic traffic, which your business really needs to help it grow. Most digital marketing experts always have a preference, for SEO as their foremost digital marketing technique. By investing in SEO techniques, you are simply making a long-term investment to ensure growth and survival for your business in a highly competitive business environment. The reason is, SEO is more efficient and cost-effective than most other online marketing techniques. That’s why it is always a preferred choice technique for digital marketers.

Email Marketing Techniques

Email Marketing has been around for a while but it is still a cost-effective marketing technique for business growth.  It comes in very handy for marketers to easily reach out to both potential and existing customers. Email is an effective marketing technique you can use to offer a valuable product for free, share a guidebook containing important information to your audience, and build a mailing list of those who indicate an interest in what you are offering. Email marketing helps to increase traffic, leads and even conversion rates particularly if you have a well-articulated newsletter containing promos and incredible product offers, which you regularly send to your audience by email.
 
Running Ads on Social Media

These days, most social media platforms have become very powerful marketing tools for millions of online marketers. The very popular social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram LinkedIn, Facebook and others are the preferred choices for marketers because of their huge popularity, ease of use and high effectiveness at spreading information quickly and widely at relatively low costs if at all. For this reason, social media ads can be very effective when it comes to getting new customers and leads/prospects. If you are marketing on social media, you have the additional benefit of taking advantage of using their free in-house analytics to measure the progress of your ads campaigns. Most social media platforms are friendly for content marketing including videos, graphics, photos, and images, which help marketers to grow their following as well as their businesses steadily. Running ads on most of the platforms is budget-friendly to boot. 

Useful Marketing Tips to Launch Your Online Marketing Business

To launch a marketing business online, you must be fully aware of what you are going into. With over one billion sites presently doing business online, no doubt, there is some crowd out there in virtual space. If you are launching your own business online, this is the crowd in which your business will operate. This requires some deep strategic thinking because there is so much more to digital marketing than simply building a visually attractive website. The bottom line is to attract good traffic to your website and that requires a very good marketing strategy to achieve. The strategy which requires that you experiment and adapt well your marketing activities such as writing different types of content, trying out and sending different types of emails and having a strong presence on different social media platforms among other related activities. By this experimentation, you will no doubt make mistakes. That’s OK. Such mistakes will help you adapt and refine your marketing strategy for good results as you go along.

These marketing tips are handy to help you launch your own online marketing business.

Get a Good Domain Name

This is very important since it serves as your business identity in virtual space. The simpler your domain name, the better it is for your business. Online marketing experts always recommend a short and easy-to-remember domain name. A good domain name is what can actually make a big difference between getting lost in digital space and creating a successful online presence for your business. If you have a domain that matches your brand name, it can help reinforce your brand and make it easier for visitors to remember and to make repeat visits. Such a good domain name will not only add credibility to your business, it will also help to build your brand by way of increased brand awareness. A simple domain name also makes it much easier to get business through word-of-mouth. This is because a simple name that is easy to memorize/remember is also easy to pass on to others. With a bit of patience and search efforts, you can get a good domain name for your business from any Domain Registrars of your choice.

Clearly Identify Your Target Audience

Every online marketer must develop an ideal customer persona to target by deliberate marketing efforts. If you know who your target customers are, it is easy to market to them directly. You can tailor your content marketing strategies in such a way as to meet the wants and needs of your targeted customers. For marketing effectiveness, the demographics of your targeted customers must always be the centerpiece of your marketing goals. These demographics include but not limited to education, hobbies, housing, family, marital status, gender, age, career, salary, location, interests, buying behavior and so on, all information you need to create effective marketing content directed at your target audience.

Create a Content Marketing Strategy

You cannot effectively market online without a workable strategy, particularly content marketing strategy. The reason is obvious. Without an effective content marketing strategy, it is very difficult to achieve your online marketing goals. Blogging must be a very vital component of your content marketing strategy. If you blog on your website, make sure your strategy involves the writing of high-quality, entertaining, and valuable content only. The more blog posts you add to your website, the more visitors will be able to find you in search engines. For best results, your blog posts must be well thought-out, highly informative, clearly written, with good spellings/grammar, easy to understand/comprehend, with high-quality images/graphics and consistently published. Doing so is one great way to, quickly establish that you are an expert in your industry. That knowledge helps to motivate people to return to your website for more useful tips and opinions from time to time.

Market with a Marketing Calendar

Marketing with a calendar is one good way to assure and build trust with your customers. Make sure you stick with your content publishing calendar to avoid disappointing your readers. It may take some energy and focus to create a calendar at the beginning, but that’s OK. When your marketing calendar is good and reliable, you can easily stay on track with all your marketing efforts. Doing so helps to make sure that your marketing platforms are putting out a constant stream of content, information, and promotions that encourage readers to have the confidence to come back regularly for more.

Set Your Marketing Budget

Marketing effectively online involves some costs. Keeping marketing costs low is always a deliberate goal of smart marketers because they know too well that investing a large sum of money into your marketing efforts does not necessarily guarantee success. Even at that, you cannot just sit back and expect people to simply find and visit your website just like that. It doesn’t work out that way. You must incur some costs to promote your business. By setting your marketing budget within the limits you can afford, no matter how low, you get better results. What really matters is to set a budget that is practical and effective for the needs of your brand, making sure not to overspend or underspend. Your budgetary limitations help to take care of that.

Develop a Social Media Strategy

Your social media strategy simply involves taking your business to where your customers are by deliberate activities. These days, you’ll find most people on social media depending on their ages which are in tandem with the platforms they prefer using. For a social media marketer, what is paramount is maximum customer engagement. If you have that as one of your top marketing objectives, you must endeavor to be on several social media platforms because of their huge popularity and ease of use to share information. The reason they are a great place you can effectively leverage to reach your target customers and communicate with them easily. If you are looking for good traffic and leads, the most popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram and the like are a great place to market your brand. Make sure to consider these platforms in your overall social media strategy.

Establish an Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective online marketing method. You need an email marketing strategy since email remains one of the top marketing channels that marketers still depend on to get traffic and leads. When used correctly, email can be a very effective and affordable way to drive leads and sales, grow customer engagement, boost customer loyalty, and grow your customer base. First thing you must do as you launch your business is to take pains to build your own reliable email list. That list allows you to be in full control of when and how you communicate with your email subscribers. Aside from its main advantage of immediacy, you can use a pre-launch email to build awareness of your website. After launching, you need a post-launch email to keep your subscribers updated with a view to persuading them to keep coming back to check out your website. That easily translates to good traffic back to our website.

8 Tips To Set Up Effective Email Marketing Campaigns

Some marketers may consider email marketing “old school” but it is still very effective in digital marketing campaigns. It is one of the most popular forms of marketing among marketers because of its relative ease of use and cost effectiveness. If you have ever signed up for any free program online or purchased something online, you must have left your email address on the site as a requirement. By doing so, you just joined someone’s growing email list and email marketing audience. That opens the way for you to receive unsolicited marketing emails until you decide to opt out if you so choose. Among online marketers, the hype always appears to be on influencer/social media marketing, blogging/content marketing and the like, but many always compliment these efforts with email marketing campaigns. The reason is, email marketing works and it is hugely effective to market any brand.

 
These tips can help you to set up an effective email marketing campaign for your business.

1. Clearly Identify Your Audience

Your email marketing campaigns can hardly gain traction if you do not know your audience well enough. It is a waste of time and efforts creating an email campaign if you do not know what your audience wants, how they want it and in what form. You must find out the kind of tone your audience responds well to as well as their status, education and age demographics. It is when you know your audience well enough that you can effectively create your marketing messages and segment the messages well enough to make them sufficiently impactful on your audience. Such are the kinds of messages most needed for your email marketing campaigns.

2. Build an Email List

Email list is a very valuable asset for email marketers. If you have the time and resources, you can build a credible email list yourself. However, building a quality email list takes quite some time. One credible way around that is to tap into the resources of professional email services providers like Mailchimp, Moosend, SalesFlare, Omnisend, Bitrix24 and other online services for same purpose. Some of this software can also help with email scheduling, timing and automation. What really matters however is to be sure your emails are, delivered intact to your targeted audience sometimes in the thousands without too many ending up as junk mails or worse, spam mails.

3. Source Email Campaign Software/Tools

If you choose to start your email marketing campaign through traditional email clients, you will end up with severely limited results. The reason is simple. By using this method, you risk having most of your mails ending up as spam, thereby depriving your recipients the benefits of the messages. One credible way around that is to use the services of online email campaign software that can provide you with all of the tools you need to get the job done effectively. You can use the services of professional email services providers like Mailchimp, Moosend, SalesFlare, Omnisend, Bitrix24 among others. These software come with various tools/packages to enable you choose what is right for your business. Once the results you are getting are good, it means the software is good.

4. Set Achievable Targets

As marketers like to say, you cannot achieve a target you cannot see and you do not have. Without a target, you are simply marketing in the dark. Setting achievable targets is one credible way to set up an effective email marketing campaign. It allows you to know from the outset of the campaigns exactly what you want to achieve, and how you will achieve it. Without set targets, you cannot design your content in a way that will target your customers effectively. Some of such targets include but not limited to the number of new customers attracted to your business over a given period of time, number of leads, volume of sales/revenue and the number of your existing and returning/repeat customers.

5. Market with Quality Content

In digital marketing, content is always king. The better the content, the more the in-bound traffic it attracts. For this reason, before setting up an effective email marketing campaign, you must make sure that your content is educational, informative, entertaining and attractive enough. This is why you must design your emails like a pro. Pay special attention to your branded logos, the right fonts, brand and color themes that make your emails attractive and easy to read. If you are marketing with videos/graphics/photographs, make sure they are of very high quality. Avoid overcrowding your emails with too much text that will not allow the text combine and work effectively with your images for good results.

6. Optimize for Mobile Devices

According to Google reports, over 60% of online searches are now attributable to mobile devices particularly smartphones. What that means is that more and more people are checking their emails on their smartphones. That makes it imperative for you to optimize your email messages for mobile devices. By making sure your email marketing campaign is compatible with mobile devices, you get better results. If you are using the right email marketing campaign software, that’s great. With it, it is a given that most emails will be compatible with mobile devices.

7. Follow-Up Feedback Emails

Effective and result oriented email marketing depends hugely on feedback mails. Never you ignore them. If you do not follow up on your emails, email marketing campaign can hardly be effective. In email marketing, persistence is key. Shooting off just one email is not likely to have enough effect on your customers. A repeated effort tends to get better results but let moderation be your watchword. Do not overdo it.  Overdoing it may infuriate some customers enough for them to unsubscribe from your mailing list. Luring your customers into a mutually beneficial conversation is what your target should be, not annoying and scaring them off. Responding sensibly to the feedback from customers’ emails can guarantee and sustain such beneficial conversations.

8. Regularly Review and Analyze Performance

Measuring and analyzing results is the only credible way to find out if you are doing well and how well you are meeting your set targets. Therefore, you must spend quality time to analyze your previous email marketing campaigns to ascertain if your efforts are yielding good results as targeted. If you are using the right email-campaign software, they have tools that can help you find out more about who responded to emails and the conversion rates. You get info about how many mails were delivered and how many were acted upon. Critically analyzing this info helps you to properly design and deploy your next campaigns for better results.

Last Line

If you are thinking of effective digital marketing, it is best to think about email marketing because of its ease of use and cost-effectiveness. These tips about can help you plan, deploy, analyze results and re-launch other marketing campaigns to get better results. If you want to rely on email campaign software, use the ones with user-friendly tools that are most effective. Without careful planning and deployment, email marketing may be mere time wasting efforts. Worse still, some emails may indeed hurt and put off some customers from doing business with you. These tips will help you to avoid such pit falls.