Spend your marketing budget wisely
Spend your marketing budget wisely
Everyone is punting online marketing as the way to go, but do we really understand what this means? In the article ‘Strategies to overcome the current economic climate’, we specifically touch on how to spend your marketing budget wisely. One of the most important channels of online marketing that we as business miss all the time is our email branding.
Ask yourself these questions and if you answer ‘yes’ to all of these, then this article is not meant for you but then again maybe you should take a read and who knows, we are never too old to learn a few tricks:
Do we know what email branding really stands for?
Do we understand the power of intelligent email branding?
Do we use the more traditional standard signature at the bottom of our emails?
Do we have well defined messaging that change randomly or does the email signature never change?
Does your email branding form part of the bigger picture i.e. is it part of your strategy?
Email and the internet offer your businesses a great opportunity to grow your marketing footprint without increasing your marketing spend. But make no mistake, the unlimited number of channels and options available online, has often made spending your marketing cents wisely online even more difficult.There is however a simple formula for success, targeting and relevance, or in simple terms making sure the right message reaches the right audience.
The marketing tools and techniques such as bulk emailing and banner advertising are perceived to be the most effective and most often used but alas! We seem to forget that we own our very own email channel and we are simply not making use of this channel that belongs to you and your employees.
When it comes to marketing online, there is simply no better way than to make full use of what already belongs to you. In this case, your everyday business emails. Not only are the recipients more targeted and the messages contained in it more relevant than anywhere else, but most importantly it is a marketing channel you OWN.
And, let’s be honest, it does not require rocket science to work this one out, you just need to be honest and admit to yourself how many times have you clicked through on banner ads on a 3rd party website or textual ads on Google or Yahoo with the intention of buying from an unknown party. In fact how many of these businesses and brands can you still remember? Most aptly NONE and NEVER.
The latest research shows that both banner ads and search engine ads have extremely low click through and conversion rates and, in fact, the average click through rate is only 0.22% or 2 clicks through per 1000 impressions. Combine this with the fact that the person clicking could be someone from another country who has no intention to do business with you, or with whom you are in any case incapable of doing business due to geographical and other issues.
Bulk mail has slightly better results, but although it is targeted, the relevance of the content makes it generally low. This is backed up by the latest marketing statistics which shows that of all bulk mail (newsletters and promotional mailers sent) only 19.8% get opened and only 5.9% normally secures click through. This is because bulk mail is mostly spam and we simply do not target the people we really want to do business with.
So, let’s ask ourselves again, how many one-on-one emails from customers, prospects, suppliers and associates do you open and read (all of them, nearly 100%…I thought so).
I hear you cry “Please help; I don’t know what to do!”
It’s simple; you should be optimising your everyday emails. Not only will this be the smartest thing you do but in fact this is one of the most effective ways of branding, creating awareness, driving traffic to your website and generates new business leads – and to think your staff will now all be classified as sales people as each and every email is now a marketing tool!