Focus 4: promotion and customer research via email

We have now reached the penultimate chapter of our journey dedicated to tools and techniques for promote a business and find customers online. We have seen in previous articles how to find customers on social networks, how to google them, and how to promote yourself with videos on Youtube and other channels. Today we take a step further and try to understand how to do email marketing and promotion. In fact, the dear old e-mail box seems to be one of the digital tools that best withstands the passing of the years. Despite WhatsApp, despite Instagram, despite Skype and Zoom, despite the thousands of communication opportunities we have today, we all continue to use email at work and in our personal lives. And we all continue, for example, to open a newsletter or promotional email. Not only that, because email, as well as being widespread, is much more effective than many other tools. How effective?

Some statistics speak of a ROI (Return On Investments, or return on investment) that reaches 40 dollars per message. For example, it can be read in a article published by Omnisend and dated January 7, 2020. Omnisend is a english email marketing platform less known than others but with many tools to intercept users via email. In the text we read:

Email marketing remains on top when it comes to ROI. As you spend one dollar, businesses, on average, earn $40 from their email marketing. This is nearly double the second closest channel (SEO) while performing much better than the others.

Which translated into Italian means:

Email marketing stays on top when it comes to ROI. For every dollar spent, businesses make an average of $40 from their email marketing. This figure is nearly double that of the second closest channel (SEO) while far outstripping all others.

In other words: if a mass sending of emails costs us 1.000 euros, it is very likely that you can get to earn 40.000! It goes without saying that the cost of our products and services affects a lot: selling gadgets and T-shirts by email is one thing, selling fine watches and diamonds or company insurance policies is another matter. But even if 40 dollars is an arithmetic mean, the fact remains that the value of email marketing remains terribly high. So let's see what alternatives we have available for promote yourself and look for new customers with a “simple” click.

NEWSLETTER

Liquidating the newsletter in a few paragraphs is almost impossible. However, we can try to clarify how this tool works in broad terms, without going into detail. Meanwhile: what is the newsletter? It is neither more nor less than one periodic communication made via email. Subscribers receive a one-time email, usually once a month or once a week. The message contains the main news, initiatives, promotions, goals achieved ("first 1.000 subscribers to our Youtube channel", "500 downloads of our ebook", etc.). To send a newsletter, special programs such as Mailchimp, Sendinblue, Mailup and others are used. The combination of text and images is essential to create a winning message. It is therefore necessary work on the quality of the content, as always, taking care of the various elements in order to strike the reader without annoying him.

For the texts we can use our advice on the Writing for marketing, the art of effective communication, while for images, boards such as Canstock Photo and Adobe Images or programs such as Paint and Canva (if not directly Photoshop) will come in handy. The best day to send the newsletter is Friday, especially between 12 and 15, when people have the phone in hand and are more likely to receive new information. Let us remember about optimize the layout for smartphones (possibility that should occur automatically in professional programs, but which must still be tested before sending). Lastly, don't forget to always insert the "unsubscribe" button: not doing so could lead to you being reported as spam, compromising the credibility of your newsletter account or even your email address.

FUNNEL

Newsletters are not the only way to promote yourself and find customers via email. Another very effective tool is the funnel, which can also be implemented through dozens (if not hundreds) of different platforms. The funnel is just one preset email sequence, connected to each other in logical progression. The funnel is more aggressive than the newsletter, because its stated objective (or underlying, depending on how explicit we want to be) is the sale of a product or service. The funnel is activated - manually or automatically - when an action is performed, such as downloading an ebook, joining a buying group, registering for a webinar, requesting a discount coupon and so on. These actions necessarily require an email address, and it will be from that email that subscribers will receive the contents of the funnel.

The strong point of the funnel is automation: compared to the newsletter, which contains updated content each time it is sent, the funnel, once set up, can be repeated infinite times, minimizing the effort and expenditure of resources of the administrator. It's like entering a shop and having a robot salesman present the products, explain the advantages, illustrate the prices and finally submit the appropriate incentives ("locked discount for the first 30 buyers", "two training courses for the price of one only for the month of April”, etc.). Obviously, there must also be the funnel ability to remove your email, also because otherwise whoever manages the funnel is liable to violate privacy (and report it to the guarantor). Now let's move on to the last alternative halfway between a newsletter and a funnel: the autoresponder.

AUTORESPONDER

We conclude this stage with a quick look at the autoresponder, a hybrid form of email marketing between the two seen previously. With the autoresponder we can set the automatic response within any form, trivially even the contact form under the product of an ecommerce. At that point the prospect will receive an automatic first response (hence the name autoresponder), followed either by a series of preconfigured emails (as in the funnel) or by further customized messages such as the newsletter. Also in this case, therefore, we are talking about an automatic tool that offers numerous advantages in terms of time, costs and results. If you don't know where to start, type autoresponder into Google and a world will open up for you!

In the next chapter we will see how promotion and customer research works with contests: another choice to make your way in marketing and stand out from the competition. Don't miss it!