Significant Benefits of Email Marketing to Digital Marketers

Email Marketing may be “old school” but it is still very popular among digital marketers. Even as common as it is, it is essentially the most advanced and effective means of communication between marketers and their ideal customers. Email marketing does not require too many hassles to use even as it is cheap, reliable, and offers great marketing benefits to marketers. Many customers are really quite accustomed to using email when communicating with businesses and brands online. The reason email performance is usually a key factor in the success or otherwise of any digital marketing campaign. Emails happen to be among the most measurable, automated, and scalable assets in a digital marketer’s marketing strategy. Here is how marketing directly with email benefits marketers.

Engagement of Potential Customers at Every Stage of the Customer Lifecycle

With emails, marketers can engage potential customers throughout the customer lifecycle. Emails really work well and get good results at every stage in that vital cycle. Here is what happens.

- You can use emails to greet new subscribers/leads at the start of their shopping journey.
- For new paying customers, email marketing strategies help customers make payments or commitments by signing an e-contract with a view to transforming these customers into repeat buyers down the road.
- For active customers/subscribers, thoughtful email marketing is essential to entice this valuable group of customers with loyalty offers, bonuses, limited-time offers, and exclusive invitations to keep their patronage.
- For dormant subscribers or unsubscribed customers, through emails, it is possible to quickly detect this class of customers that is no longer interested in doing business with a brand. It is either they have stopped opening their mails or making any responses whatsoever. That means it is time to engage them more with emails with a view to changing the situation for the better.

Provides Key Insights into How Your Audience Engages

Simple email metrics can help you with the necessary information/key insights about how your email recipients engage with your brand and your marketing info. This vital info can help to rejig or redesign your email marketing strategy for better results. Through these insights, you can have a clear idea about email Click-Through-Rate (CTR), Email opening rate, Bounce rate, Unsubscribing rate, Conversion rate and suchlike vital marketing info that can help you to make strategic decisions about how to sell more in each segment of your email recipients.

 
Generates Very High Return-On-Investment, ROI

Every digital marketer always wants to keep costs low and returns high. Email marketing is particularly very good at this. Because of the relatively low cost of running email campaigns, it is easy to get a high Return-On-Investment, ROI. This reality on its own serves as a major incentive for digital marketers to fine-tune their email marketing strategies with a view to maximizing their ROI. As online marketing statistics generally indicate, among online marketing channels, email marketing is now well known as the marketing channel that generates the highest ROI for marketers. One surprising statistic is that email is about 40 times more effective in acquiring new customers than many very popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. This development is really good for email marketing business if you ask me.

5 Business Reasons to Undertake Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

Affiliate marketing has now become a difficult-to-ignore strategy to sell products/services online. It is not as complicated as it may sound. It is really quite a simple, low-cost and low risk way to sell more products/services online and with hugely beneficial returns. For sure, affiliate marketing has been around for quite a while and very popular with digital marketers but it must be done right to get the right results. It is not really a new strategy so to say, but it remains one of the most effective strategies to sell products/services and make money online. With affiliate marketing, marketers who have a product-based business can readily get more ROI, save time and open up more PR opportunities if they have an effective affiliate marketing strategy. The simplicity of affiliate marketing as a business model really lies in the ability of a brand/product merchant providing each affiliate with a unique URL or promotional code to use in their websites/blogs. When affiliates promote these links to their audience, all purchases made through the links entitle the affiliate to a commission. More affiliates campaigns usually translate to more sales and more commissions earned by affiliates. Simple!

Here are 5 reasons affiliate marketers cannot afford to ignore affiliate marketing campaigns in their overall marketing strategy.

1. Wider Reach: The more the number of affiliates you have in your network, the greater the potentials of your reach. The reason is simple. You leverage your own network and the individual networks of all your affiliates to put out your marketing messages to expand your reach. For this reason, if you are diligent and painstaking enough to choose your affiliates correctly, they can significantly expand your reach into new audiences and the results could be phenomenal. Through this scenario, affiliate marketing can easily give your business a global footprint within a relatively short while. This it does by putting your brand/product/service in front of thousands if not millions of your customers and potential customers for less effort.
 
2. Low Cost of Operation: Every reasonable business owner must always keep a keen eye on costs. Affiliate marketing campaigns are relatively cost-effective when compared to traditional marketing methods on TV and Radio where paid ads cost a fortune even without any guarantees that you’ll earn a dime in returns. With affiliate marketing, all you really need is an in-demand product/service, a carefully selected group of interested affiliates with an engaged audience and a decent commission to incentivize your affiliates. That’s it! You are obligated to pay your affiliates only when they make a sale. Quite simple really! You only pay commissions for sales made and nothing else. This arrangement has no chance of hurting your ads budget since your affiliates only take their commission right off the top of the sales you are making. No other marketing tactics come closer to this in terms of low operational costs.

3. Low Risk to Operate: Keeping risks low is also good for business just like keeping costs low. In affiliate marketing, it is easy for the brand/product merchant to push the hard work of marketing to affiliates. That helps to give the brand more time for product development. Since affiliates are expected to be paid only when they make a sale, it simply means the marketing campaigns are essentially self-funding. The harder affiliates work to promote products/services therefore, the more money they make. All affiliates know that if they don’t make sales, they don’t make money. They are therefore obligated to always up their game, take more risks, make more sales and make more money by way of commissions. Simple!

 
4. Easy to Track Metrics: Without the right metrics, it is always pretty difficult to adequately track marketing campaigns. Quite fortunately, affiliate marketing is one of the most easily trackable ways to market your business online. With every affiliate issued a unique code or URL, you can easily determine through these codes, exactly which affiliates are getting you which results. That makes it easy for the product merchant to compare results from his numerous affiliates. It is thus easy to know which of these affiliates are most profitable and how to reward them adequately. Through these efforts, some brands can even decide to give high-performing affiliates better terms or even more incentives like higher commissions in exchange for making a certain amount of predetermined level of sales.

5. Easily Scalable: In digital marketing, economics of scale can always be leveraged for better results. Since every affiliate gets paid depending on the sales they generate, you can at any time add more and unlimited number of affiliates to help generate sales. Therefore, any number of affiliates can always be added to your program as needed and at any time. Because brands are only required to pay affiliates a commission on every sale, affiliate marketing is easy to scale up without hurting the marketing budget of your business.

How to Scale your Online Business for Global Market

For business expansions and increased revenues, many online businesses are going global. That warrants sudden growths in some instances. These sudden growths come with their own unique challenges. The reason marketers now pay more attention to scalability. Global expansion calls for an appropriate scalable strategy of business development. Such strategy ensures your business can manage a substantial increase in demand without a critical drop in quality of service. If your business is scalable, you can manage exponential growth over time even with sustained quality of service. Good management is key to guaranteeing that. With good management, you can effectively combine a high-demand product/service with solid support and production possibilities by scaling essential elements of the business. Some of these elements may be business-specific but you’ll do nicely if you can first fulfill these here universal requirements.

Make Comprehensive Plans

You must plan long term and comprehensively. That is very essential in global business expansions. Have substantial market research before drawing up a plan. This plan must include how to seamlessly reach and serve your customers anywhere they are in the world. Essentially you must plan for your teams, online ads, delivery systems, resources, including financing, international trade, tariffs, taxes and so on.

Automate all Processes you can Automate

To enter a worldwide online market and be able to make some impact, you need to have quality time and resources at your disposal. Both may not be readily available. That calls for automation. To save time and resources, you need to automate certain aspects of your business. Characteristically, automation allows for more efficient use of time and resources and it contributes to a positive customer experience. You can automate emails and deploy Artificial Intelligence AI, generously in your marketing activities. AI can help in automatic language translations, currency conversions, customer service and many other activities that you would otherwise have needed personnel to handle.

Provide Universal Solutions

One great way to scale your business for global audience is to provide products/services that are universally acceptable. What that means is that you can scale your online business worldwide by offering something that is needed across the world. If the product/service you are offering helps to solve a problem for different people from around the world, you can do profitable global business with it. No matter how effective your marketing campaigns are and how great your business funding is, you cannot successfully scale your business on the global market without a substantial demand for your product/service. Providing solutions with universal appeal helps to address that challenge.

Endeavor to Rank Well on Google SERPs

You can hardly market successfully online to a global audience without the help of search engines particularly a major search engine like Google. Google must like your content and rank it high enough for it to reach a global audience better. That calls for a good SEO on your website. A good SEO will help Google to rank your website well enough to send free organic traffic to it from anywhere around the world where keywords/phrases related to the site are used to make searches on Google.

Partner Reputable Logistics Companies

Unless your product is a virtual or digital product, you must arrange to have it delivered as is to any corner of the globe. That calls for partnerships with reputable logistics companies with global delivery experience. Damaged goods, pilfered goods, lost parcels and delivery delays are very bad for international business reputation. Partnering with reputable business services with extensive shipping, handling and storage capabilities can help with scalable growth for your business no matter the surge in future demands.

Fund your Business Adequately

Sudden and rapid business expansion that global reach may require has to be funded adequately. All sources of funding must be on the table at all times. You can get funded by investors, through bank loans or government funding agencies’ grants or a combination of two or more of them. Whichever you use, be sure it is reliable enough to be stepped up when demand suddenly surges. Doing international business successfully is near impossible without adequate funding and adequate funding helps the scalability of your business.

Take Advantage of Outsourcing

Outsourcing certain components of your business helps to bring down costs without lowering standards or outputs. No matter how efficient your business team is, a global business surge may task it to breakable limits particularly when the surge is sudden. So, outsourcing comes in to help out. Because there is a limit to the tasks your team can efficiently handle, you can consider enhancing human resources or outsourcing tasks that are beyond their field of expertise. If your business experiences sudden growth that overstretches your team, to avoid compromising on quality, you can outsource tasks like customer support for instance and still be doing great. Thus, you can always do well to avoid overburdening your team with any work that can be outsourced as and when needed.

Keep a Keen Eye on your Business Analytics

If you market online, without the benefit of analytics data, it is like marketing in the dark. Whatever marketing results you can measure online by way of analytics data should be carefully measured and analyzed. Your analytics data will give reliable info about inbound traffic, sources of traffic, sales growth, trends, conversions and other key performance metrics. The analysis of such data will allow you to develop predictions, attract investors, plan ahead, react to challenges, and make projections/forecasts. That gives you the much needed business confidence about the future of your global business. A good scalable strategy assumes that with such vital knowledge at your fingertips, you are willing, able and ready to take on any business issues as they arise even if occasioned by sudden business surge.

Concluding Thoughts

Even if you are experienced in your business, scaling it online should be deliberately systematic with good planning. Expect challenges like disappointing sales, sudden and unexpected growth surges that may induce loss of quality if adequate care is not taken. There are hardly any of these challenges you cannot handle well enough if you planned well. With a scalable development strategy, you can easily make adjustments as you go along. For so long as you have a good idea what you are up against, you can always take the necessary steps as needed to grow your online business reputation and for your global business to prosper in the long term. That no doubt demands from you quality time and efforts.

5 Smart Ways to Position Your Business for the Future

If you run a business, positioning it for visibility creates exposure and patronage. As you grow the business, it’s not only important to consider the present but the future as well. That is largely why you need credible ways to ensure the business is able to grow and scale over time. These here tips can help you in that quest.

Adopt Ways to Find and retain Customers

Finding customers is one skill, retaining them is another. If you want your business to have any kind of sustainable success, you need to be able to keep your existing customers, as well as gain new ones. That to a large extent helps to guarantee future growth for the business.

Switch Your Blog to Https

Content marketing is still very effective at putting your business out there to attract customers’ attention. That is why you need your own blog. If you already have a blog, for increased security and other features for it, you’ve got to switch it to Https. If you do, the prospect of losing social proof on your old blog posts can potentially hold you back but there are easy ways you can make the switch without losing that social proof.  Just talk to experts in that field.

Make Your Business Scalable

According to marketing experts, if you want your business to succeed well into the future, you need to build a business that’s scalable. All you need do is to put systems in place which you can easily adjust as your business grows. That makes things relatively easier for the future growth of your business.

Make Your Mobile Site Load Faster

These days, nearly everyone goes around with smart mobile devices which they use to transact various businesses. Making your website mobile adaptable is now very essential. However, for it to be effective, it must load easily, faster and be accessible almost everywhere. But you also need it to be as functional as a regular website, meaning you need it to load quickly.

Use a Content Audit to Grow Your Business

This is a must if you want to position your business for the future. According to content marketing experts, for businesses that use content marketing, not just any content will be able to help your business grow. For that reason, you need a content audit from time to time. That is what can help you weed out unhelpful content from the rest thereby making your blog relevant and helpful to your readers always.