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4 Marketing Challenges and How Email Can Solve Them
Is your company facing marketing challenges like low customer retention, weak lead generation or struggles to make any gains due to a limited budget? These are common problems that can threaten the success of your business. Getting your name out there, building a loyal customer base and growing your business requires a targeted marketing strategy that maximizes every cent of your advertising budget with positive, brand-building exposure. That’s where email marketing comes in.
Email marketing is an affordable, effective digital marketing tool that can help solve both large and small business challenges. From boosting customer engagement to generating positive brand awareness, email connects you to a willing audience that has actively agreed to receiving your marketing communications. It’s a timesaver, too. Email campaigns can be fully automated, tracked and measured with a click, versus direct mail, which is far more difficult to track.
Read on to learn more about how email marketing can help you boost your business and solve some of your most frustrating marketing challenges.
Marketing Challenge #1: Customer Retention
Acquiring new customers costs way more than keeping your existing customers. Depending on the industry, it can cost anywhere from 5 to 7 times more money to convince a new customer to engage with your business. The good news is that once you have gained those customers, it costs far less money to keep them — if you have a solid customer retention strategy. Retaining customers requires excellent service, appreciation for their business and steady engagement. You want the loyal people who keep your business strong to stay that way.
Email Marketing Solution: Customer Engagement Emails
Staying connected with your customers is the key to keeping your brand top-of-mind. It can make or break the final decision when they decide to make a new purchase. Email can help keep your name in their inbox on a regular basis so they’re always aware of your opportunities. Email is unobtrusive, not pressuring, and it allows your customers to engage with you at their convenience.
The trick to remember with email engagement is not to annoy your customers. No one wants a constant nattering voice telling them to buy, buy, buy. Moreover, they also don’t want three emails a day, every day. Doing that will create new marketing challenges. Then you’ll need to solve those new problems with other strategies. Your emails should provide value to your customers so they are more inclined to open it. They should always build brand awareness and create a positive association with your company.
Regular email contact can include:
- Welcome and thank you emails. Welcome new customers to your company email list. Thank customers for signing up for your newsletter. Send a personalized email thanking them for their purchase. Show appreciation and excitement that they are choosing to work with you.
- Celebration emails: Send a personalized happy birthday or anniversary email. You can obtain this information with an email opt-in form and then automate celebratory greetings. If you like, you can include an offer. These emails show your customer that you’re paying attention and that you value their business.
- E-newsletter emails: Create a regular contact touchpoint with monthly or quarterly newsletters. These emails are not directly sales-focused, although they can introduce new products or include a discount or coupon. The latter is not necessary if the content of your newsletter is relevant, well-written and useful.
- Survey emails: Check the pulse of your target audience with periodic review requests. A simplified survey can help your customer feel heard and provide you with valuable feedback about your sales process and CX.
Marketing Challenge #2: Customer Acquisition
Another top marketing issue for all businesses is customer acquisition. Finding new customers is imperative to the success of your business. Gaining leads, however, can be a difficult task for marketing professionals. Businesses can waste a large amount of money on ineffective marketing tactics, like buying leads or diluting their message by appealing to the broadest possible audience instead of the audience most likely to buy.
Email Marketing Solution: Capture New Leads with an Email Lead Generation Strategy
An email lead generation strategy can help you generate an entire database of current and potential customers. Gathering emails may sound difficult at first. After all, if you’re struggling to find new customers, it would be reasonable to assume you’re also struggling to collect the emails attached to those customers, right? Not only that, there are several regulations that restrict how email marketing can be leveraged. Fines for mistakes can be quite expensive.
Fortunately, the solution to generating leads through capturing emails can be easily solved with an opt-in form on your website. Opt-in forms typically utilize an offer to entice customers to share their email in exchange for the proposed benefits. For example, you might generate an informative monthly newsletter related to your industry, or offer a one-time 10% discount on a purchase.
Additionally, with an opt-in form, visitors voluntarily share their email address with you, including consent to receive regular communication. You can try multiple different opt-in rewards to find the one that generates the most buy-in.
Marketing Challenge #3: Budget
If there’s one marketing problem that is universal for all marketing teams, it’s that there never seems to be enough of the marketing budget to go around. Unfortunately, marketing efforts can be incredibly costly. Moreso when you get into media buying involving print, television and radio. Digital marketing problems like ad overspend or poor testing can eat into your budget. If you do not have a lot of experience navigating pay-per-click or managing search engine marketing, that can increase the expense. Balancing a precarious budget requires a savvy email marketing strategy that increases reach at minimal cost.
Email Marketing Solution: Affordable, Automated Customer Communication
The easiest way to show how email marketing can solve budget issues is just to share the numbers. Popular email marketing platforms like Constant Contact note that companies that leverage email marketing make $36 for every dollar spent on email campaigns. For some industries, that number can climb to $45.
Remember, those numbers also do not take into account the amount of money businesses save via the speed and convenience of email. Automation allows companies to reach thousands of customers in any time zone on any day of the week. You develop the schedule, upload the content and let the internet do the rest. Automation also means tracking. You can test different emails, track open rates and clicks and, in some cases, follow your email all the way from the initial send to the customer’s final purchase. Adjustments to your strategy can be made in real time, ensuring you don’t continue spending resources on a poorly performing campaign. Altogether, email makes a difference, especially if your budget is tight.
Marketing Challenge # 4: Competition
It can be hard to stand out from the crowd. This is especially true if you operate a smaller business with a limited budget. You not only need to beat out local competitors, you must fight for facetime with companies who spend more on marketing in a month than many businesses will make in a year. If you want your product or service to stand out, you need to find marketing channels that give you the leading edge without destroying your marketing budget.
Email Marketing Solution: Outpace the Competition with Consistent Connection
Email can help you solve this top marketing challenge by reinforcing brand awareness, building customer loyalty and creating a persistent, personalized connection with your customers. This doesn’t mean that you inundate your audience with constant sales pitches. That’s a great way to end up with a whole lot of unsubscribe requests. No one wants to feel harassed every time they check their inbox. It might even drive them to your competitors in an effort to escape your third sale announcement of the day.
By and large, an effective email strategy balances solicitation with useful content that actually benefits the customer. Yes, you will absolutely send sales-focused emails. However, your marketing team should also create meaningful content that helps your customers while slowly progressing them down the sales funnel. For example, you could create an email with a link to your latest blog, a quarterly newsletter, a free download or a happy birthday greeting. Remember, these types of email communications show that you are invested in your customers while also positioning you as a knowledgeable ally they can trust to help them solve their problems.
Email Offers an Affordable, Accessible Solution to Your Toughest Marketing Challenges
Email marketing offers an affordable option for tackling marketing challenges like customer acquisition, budgeting, customer retention and competition. Meet customers where they are with content they value any time of day, any place they choose to check their inbox.
Would you like help establishing an email strategy to address your current marketing pain points? Drop us a note to set up a time to discuss your needs. We would love to help you improve your outcomes from your hard-earned marketing dollars.
