Email marketing can be a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes, when properly harnessed. But should start-ups consider adopting it as part of their initial promotional push, or should they wait until they are more established before they pursue this path?
Here is a look at the benefits of email marketing for start-ups and the lessons they can learn from successful firms that have leveraged it in the past.
Consumers Embrace It
In the wake of the arrival of new data protection regulations this year, email marketing has emerged as one of the biggest winners. A report from DMA suggests that three quarters of prospective customers would be happier to be targeted via email than any other platform.
This shows that start-ups that want to approach average web users without putting them off immediately should look to the email marketing tools offered via platforms like Drip. This will let them build relationships from scratch and nurture them effectively over time, rather than missing out on leads through less effective alternative channels.
ROI Is Respectable
For new businesses, cash may be in short supply, so you want to make sure that any money you spend on promotion is recouped quickly, rather than being thrown down a bottomless black pit.
When it comes to email marketing, one study found that the return on investment that this solution delivers is around 122 per cent. That easily elevates it above the likes of PPC, social media marketing and traditional snail mail.
Of course the affordability of email marketing means that it is even easier to justify creating a compelling campaign. You do not need to dedicated a large chunk of your budget to testing the water with targeted emails, and the rewards can be significant in the long term.
Visuals Drive Engagement
Building your start-up’s brand identity is essential to convincing customers to come onboard with you on your journey towards greatness. And with an email marketing campaign, you can use images and media elements to strengthen this and make sure that it sticks in the memory of everyone who opens your message.
The aesthetic design of your initial campaign needs to be consistent and cohesive; if you fail to unify your branding with the other elements you include, then this could seem amateurish in the eyes of web-savvy consumers.
This not only applies to things like images and colour schemes, but also the way your messages are formatted. Marketing emails need to look great across a range of devices, so taking advantage of a modern, mobile-friendly platform to manage all of this is key to gaining momentum as a start-up.
Carefully Crafted Copy is Crucial
Your email might look great, but unless it conveys the intended marketing message concisely and in a way that’s in keeping with your brand, it might well miss its mark completely.
Try to check out some marketing emails sent by successful businesses and brands to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t when it comes to copy. Short, snappy sentences tend to work best, but you also need to keep paragraphs as compact as possible and space everything appropriately so it’s straightforward to scan through.
Perhaps the most important aspect of an entire email marketing campaign will be the subject line of the message itself, as this will be the thing which convinces recipients to either open it up or send it straight to the trash folder. Simple, informative, engaging copy here will make all the difference, and again it’s sensible to see how other businesses do it to work out whether or not the approach you are considering will be a winner.
In most cases, successful firms did not make it to the top by accident; they started small, developed their brands and made use of impactful tools to get where they are today. Email marketing is a boon for modern start-ups and is the ideal stepping stone to bigger and better things, so long as you are willing to learn lessons gleaned from paying close attention to how the big fish do things.
