Why Email Marketing is Important to Your Small Business

 

To some digital marketers, email marketing now appears “old school” but it still gets some great results. Email marketing is not only convenient, it is also cost-effective particularly for small business owners who are characteristically low on marketing budget most for the time. Crafting effective email campaigns requires some knowledge and skills. Once you get it right, the results are amazing. That is why email marketing is so important to small business owners who operate on low marketing budgets.

 

No doubt other messaging channels are also very important to business owners depending on their types of businesses. Notwithstanding that, email remains the main channel of communication for small businesses. Business owners effectively use email messages to lead consumers through the whole sales and marketing funnel, converting them to customers in the process. They rely on emails to assist their website visitors to interact with their apps, engage them more, and consequently increase their brand loyalty. Without a doubt, email marketing is one of the most efficient channels for customer retention. Ambitious marketers never lose sight of that fact. There is some credible research report indicating that “a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit” Profit motive is what largely drives most small business owners and anything they do that helps them to increase profits, gets done more and better. That is the lot of email marketing.

To create effective email campaigns, marketers must pay special attention to two big areas of crafting email templates and handling email recipients. Experienced marketers can manually build email templates fairly easily. However, to save time and to guarantee efficiency and effectiveness, delegating your database management and sending logic to a dedicated and reputable email marketing service can also be considered.

If you resolve to follow DIY route, please pay attention to the following tips. Before you start creating your email campaigns, decide firmly on the following:
Your objectives/motives
The goals you want to achieve
Your recipient audience
Your type of marketing messages
The role great content will play
How to segment your audience

This information will help you to make the all-important decision on the type of email campaigns your business needs. Your emails even if largely technical must be transactional in messaging to be effective. For as long as they have marketing, branding, and even sales purposes, they’re great to form part of your marketing and product strategies. Meaning? For your emails to be effective for proper branding and sales, they must have well-crafted templates and carefully worded and optimized messages with great aesthetics appeal to boot.

Tips for Effective Live Chats on Your Website

In today’s digital business world, communication is key. The faster and clearer it is to communicate with prospective customers and customers, the better for the business. If as is expected your business website has easy-to-navigate features, convenient automation options and simple site integration, you can easily set up instant messaging on the site. A leading customer service tool that easily comes to mind here is live chat. But, live chat is only effective when used correctly. When used correctly, live chat is a powerful communication tool that helps to quickly address customer concerns, answer questions, and give vital information and even secure sales real time. However, when wrongly used, it is capable of hindering the performance of your website by frustrating your communication activities. That scenario is avoidable if you take cognizance of these tips.

 

Be Proactive in Your Messaging

Many prospective customers who hit on your website may abandon it fast if they are unable to find answers to their nagging concerns/questions fast enough. That creates high bounce rate problems. With live chats, you can combat rising bounce rates with the use of proactive messaging. By using real-time visitor monitoring and variable triggers, you can easily target consumers based on their browsing habits. You can then utilize automated messages to ask the right questions or provide valuable information in the exact moment your website visitors need it. With such proactive messaging, you greatly increase your chances of securing sales conversion.

Make Chats Convenient and Easily Accessible

Live chat features should ideally be installed on very prominent and easily accessible location on your website. That makes it convenient to use because one of the most significant benefits of live chat is its peculiar convenience. It is great for instant messaging when compared to emails. With live chat instant messaging, marketers can greatly cut down on the time consumers spend tracking down contact numbers or email addresses. That means live chat provides consumers with significantly low-barrier support option. If well-integrated, live chat can provide a disruption-free customer service experience thereby eliminating the time-wasting need to sit on hold or wait minutes, hours, days or even weeks for an email response for example.

Revamp Your Strategies

There is a need to revamp your marketing strategies if you want to introduce live chat into your marketing. Chat allows you to add a more personalized and conversational approach to your marketing tactics. With chats, you can provide a quicker and more effective customer service to your customers. That is something that is difficult to achieve through traditional customer support services. The benefits of instant message support are extensive. They include a decrease in customer service response, minimizing support costs, enhancing user experience, increasing sales and brand loyalty. You must decide on which of these benefits you are targeting in your strategy before you launch a live chat. That is vital to your success.

Make Interactions Need-Based and Personal

Exploring ways to interact with consumers on a personalized basis is always very effective. Everyone likes to feel important and to be treated as such. That appears to be the reason why many consumers look for personalized experiences.  Quick chats are characteristically one-on-one interaction and many consumers appreciate that and they respond better to your marketing efforts as a result. So, if you tailor your marketing resources to support agents having knowledge of past chats or purchases, personalization can improve the messaging experience. Pressed further, need-influenced message personalization can effectively translate to better quality leads, increased brand loyalty and higher sales figures.

Factor in Valuable User Experiences

In today’s digital marketing world, marketing without factoring in user experience in your efforts is usually an uphill struggle. With consumer expectations increasing daily and search engines becoming more technical in ranking websites, it is now more vital than ever for marketers to increase site satisfaction and ease of use of their websites. One of the most profitable ways to do that is to introduce live chat to your website. That is one great way to enhance its user experience. Live chat combines effectively with the fundamental elements already at play on your site to maintain a cohesive experience and a search engine-friendly structure.

Optimize Chat for Mobile Usage

Google reports indicate that nearly 50% of all web traffic is attributable to mobile devices. Now that is a very huge chunk of traffic attributable to people who do business on the go and from any and everywhere. What this means is that many more people are visiting websites from their mobile devices as against traditional desktop computers. How do marketers take advantage of this development? Simple! Just optimize your website for mobile devices by creating a site, including live chat that is easy-to-use on cellphones, tablets and any other smart mobile devices. A mobile-friendly chat interface on your website can help to boost its user-experience and inbound traffic a great deal.

Final Thoughts

No matter the type of business you are marketing, incorporating live-chat feature on your website is great for customer support. Ranging from improving user experience and overall customer satisfaction to generating more leads/customers/sales, the benefits of live chat are really immense to marketing strategies. Consumers now want quick service and they want it like yesterday. Live-chat feature on business websites comes very handy there. Marketers must adapt to rapid changes in consumer expectations or they get left behind as their businesses take a hit from avoidable negligence.