by Yoon Cannon | Business Growth Tips Blog, General, Success Mindset
Small business owners often struggle to find the best marketing strategy that fits their budget. Here is a look at some of the greatest tips for getting the most bang from your marketing budgeting.
Whether you’re a B2B, B2C or expert firm, you’ll walk away with enough secrets to successful marketing to add new leads and find loyal customers.
How Do You Successfully Market a Small Business?
Small and medium enterprises in the United States spend marketing dollars directly based on a business owner’s decisions. Smaller businesses might find it wiser to focus on local clients first. According to Statista, companies spend around $173.3 million per year on local advertising. They split the rest between TV, radio, digital and events.
Successful marketing strategy execution often starts with an overarching goal. Small business owners find a top-of-mind awareness (TOMA) strategy works well to build brand awareness and develop a loyal customer base. Over time, you’ll gain referrals from your current clients.
What are some of the top secrets to successful marketing campaigns? Here are our top suggestions for small business owners.
1. Learn From Your Customers
Get to know your audience and what their needs are. The better you understand your buyers, the easier it will be to meet their needs. You can survey them, pay attention to buying trends and ask what you can do to improve their experience.
With your TOMA marketing strategy, you’ll want to take actions such as:
- Call those who buy from you repeatedly and ask why they chose your brand in the first place.
- Inquire about how you can help them refer more friends and family. For example, can you offer any materials that would be of help? Reward them when they do refer new customers.
- Survey your customers after a successful campaign. Find out why they chose to buy and if they have other needs. When you understand their pain points, developing the relationship you need to keep your brand at the top of their thoughts becomes much easier.
Pay close attention to any negative comments or complaints. How can you fix the issue for that customer and prevent it on future orders?
2. Use New Technology to Manage Clients
You don’t have to track every little detail of your clients’ needs. Instead, invest in technology that handles customer relationship management. Regular emails from you can keep you at the forefront of their thoughts.
- Try to automate functions such as sending out emails when new products arrive they might be interested in.
- Send a birthday greeting to let them know you enjoy their business.
- Offer discounts when sales slow down to clear out old merchandise and make way for new.
The happier your clients are, the more you can use their reviews and testimonials in your marketing campaigns.
3. Promote Yourself
Put yourself in the shoes of the average person visiting your site for the first time. If you’re a newer business, they’ve likely not heard of you and don’t know if they should buy. However, they’ll feel more comfortable trying out your product if you stand behind your work.
People often have to hear of you several times before remembering the brand name and messaging. How can you promote yourself consistently and frequently for your TOMA approach?
- Create a social media persona matching your brand personality.
- Post frequently and predictably at the same time of day and on the same weekdays.
- Enlist the help of others to get your name out there. Ask customers to share your social media posts or forward your newsletter.
- Pay for ads to get in front of the same people repeatedly.
Feature glowing feedback from customers and highlight how much you believe in what you offer. Do you feel your product or service is the best in the industry? Thinking about your unique value proposition and using it in your marketing can help gain new clients’ trust.
4. Send Welcome Emails
You likely already know email marketing can be highly effective at attracting and keeping customers. However, did you know that welcome emails have a 91.43% open rate and offer an opportunity to highlight your brand personality?
How can you enhance your brand awareness via emails?
- Stick with brand guidelines, using your logo and brand color palette for instant recognition.
- Make calls to action (CTAs) look the same as the ones on your website so people know to look for a particular pop of color.
- Create great subject lines that tell users exactly what they’ll get when they open the email.
You can also track how well an email performs by seeing how many opens you get and who clicks through to your offer.
5. Use SMS
Short message service (SMS) is an excellent way to add personal touches to messages you send. You might use it for customer service issues and to problem solve. There are also many ways to connect with your clients through small positive messages.
- Circulate an offer, discount code or just share news.
- Add links to orders or short surveys.
- Send a happy thought just to let customers know you are thinking of them and care about more than just making a sale.
- Thank them for an order or update them on the status of one.
Many businesses have found great success with this marketing strategy. 98% of people will open your message, which is why thousands have used texting to drive customer retention.
6. Set Clear Employee Expectations
As your company’s leader, you must train your employees in the customer service model you want to exude. Make sure everyone understands your expectations and their role in the buyer’s journey.
- Write out what your company policies and philosophies are.
- Encourage employees to tell others why it’s a great place to work.
- Feature your top staff members. Put a face to the workers for better brand awareness.
At the same time, you don’t want to create an atmosphere where people say, “That’s not in my job description.” Set the example by jumping in and helping when someone feels overwhelmed or has a tight deadline. If your employees see you taking the lead and helping others, they’ll be more likely to embrace the same spirit with their work.
7. Watch Trends
Pay attention to what kids are into and how other businesses in your industry market to their customer bases.
When apps like TikTok first arrived on the scene, mainly preteens used it to repeat dances and popular songs. Today, companies worldwide use them to reach new customers via fun marketing videos.
Stay on top of what your competitors are doing.
- Study their social media presence. What kinds of posts do they schedule? How often do they post? Do they use paid ads?
- Why do people know their name? Do they do a lot of radio interviews? Perhaps they sponsor local groups and have a strong presence in your community.
- Study their name versus yours. Is their business moniker more memorable or more applicable to the industry?
Take a step back and rethink your brand image. Don’t be afraid to rebrand if necessary or to tweak colors and messaging until you hit what keeps your brand at the forefront.
Why Should You Change Up Your Marketing?
Embracing new trends and paying attention to what works for the competition are the secrets to successful marketing. You may not have time to woo people one-on-one, but you can automate relationship management and invest in social media marketing.
If you fail to step up and try new things, you risk growing stale and your customers getting bored with your brand. You only have time and effort to spend. If something doesn’t work, replace it with a new idea.
If you choose to focus on a top-of-mind awareness strategy as outlined above, run everything through the filter of how it will impact brand recognition and keep your audience engaged.
Which one of these list items would you like to implement today to find your successful marketing strategy?
Eleanor Hecks is the founder and managing editor of Designerly Magazine. She’s also a web design consultant with a focus on customer experience and user interface. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dogs, Bear and Lucy. Connect with her about marketing, design and/or tea on LinkedIn!
by Yoon Cannon | Attract More Customers, Business Growth Tips Blog, Lead generation
Do your contacts engage with your emails the way you would expect them to be? How many of your readers do actually open the emails and reply to you?
While no magic wand can help you convince everyone to open your emails and reply back, there are some tips that you can implement to improve your email campaign results. But, before implementing the tips that we have prepared for you in this email, you should start by creating clear goals for your email marketing campaign.
The most popular objectives for email marketing campaigns are the following:
- Increasing the email open rate
- Personalizing the customer’s experience
- Establishing a connection with the email subscribers
- Improving the emails click-through rate
- Succeed in retaining the target customers and turn them into valuable brand advocates
Now that you have more clarity on the ways email marketing can help you, are you ready to find more about the 12 clever ways you can use to get a response from your recipients?
Tip #1: Create intriguing subject lines
You compare your subject lines with the movie trailers. Would you be curious to see a movie if the trailer is dull and unexciting? Most probably not! The same happens with the subject lines.
For example, the scarcity tactic seems to be working very well these days. A subject line that looks like this: “4 HOURS ONLY! 75% off ALL Jackets in Stores. Go!” would make any “fashionista” grab a cab and go to your store immediately.
Another successful tactic would be adding punctuation and questions directly in the subject line. By using this tactic, you start a conversation with your prospect directly from the subject line. For instance, if you ask a question in the subject line, you intrigue your prospect to give you an answer.
Take the example of Sephora, which sends an email with the subject line “Rough Day?”. In other words, the brand sends an invitation to dialogue and intrigues the recipient to immediately open the email and find more about the company’s proposal.
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Tip #2: Keep your content readable
Imagine that your reader opens your email after an exhausting day in the office. Would he/she be impressed by an email that includes phrases highlighted with red, yellow, green, while others are written in italic or bold? Or would he/she like an email that is easy to read and includes different bullet points that make it easier to understand the main idea?
Instead of using special fonts or different colors, you can win the readers by keeping the content clean and using bold or underline to highlight some important words. Also, you can improve your readability by maintaining the contrast ratio at 4:5:1 for normal text and 7:1 for large text. Besides, you can use tools like Color Contrast Checker or Colorzilla to improve your contrast ratio.
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Tip #3: Personalize Your Emails As Much As Possible
Personalizing your emails and subject lines can significantly improve the response rate. According to studies, a subject line personalizer will improve the response rate by 26%. According to a study developed by Experian Marketing Services, personalized emails can generate six times higher transaction rates.
You can take the example of Uber that uses this powerful strategy very often. For instance, the company sends an email to its users after the first month of using its services. The email usually starts with the phrase “You’re doing awesome, [recipient’s name].”
In the emails sent by Uber, the company includes details according to the recipient’s habits of using their services. Therefore, Uber’s emails include advice on what their prospects can do to improve their statistics to benefit from the company’s special offers. An email like this will automatically attract the recipient’s attention and obtain a reaction from his/her side.
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Tip #4: Carefully proofread your text
An email that contains grammar or spelling errors will be immediately considered unprofessional or spam by readers. You shouldn’t forget that your emails speak about your professionalism and attention to detail. So, if you want to make a good first impression, you should take proofreading seriously. It may seem a tiring job, but it’s helpful for your professional image.
Tip #5: Use segmentation to get the best results
When you send the same email to your prospects, they see you are not interested in their personal needs. Depending on your business profile, you should address your messages to different categories of customers. As each client category has different needs and expectations, the emails should reflect these aspects as well.
You should segment your list and personalize your emails to target the right type of customers. You can filter your clients based on gender, age, or product interests. For instance, if you choose to segment your audience based on age, you should know that the difference between the prospects born in 1996 and 2010 is an 8-second attention span.
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Tip #6: Choose the right moment to send your emails
Many marketers make the mistake of sending emails when their target audience is too busy to read them. When you create your emailing strategy, you should first analyze the metrics delivered by your emailing software. Based on your customer’s behavior, it will tell you when most of your readers open your emails.
Many marketers send their emails three times per month. This is a good strategy as long as they choose the right time to send it. Studies show that the perfect time for sending emails should be between 8 am and 4 pm. Besides, some specialists consider it better to send emails during the weekends when people are more relaxed and open to reply to a personalized email.
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Tip #7: Optimize your email’s format for mobile devices
Studies show that approximately 46% of all emails are opened on mobile. Also, 35% of business professionals prefer to open their emails from their mobile devices.
This means that you should format your emails to be easily opened from a desktop or mobile device. Such a strategy will help you improve your response rate and tell your readers that you care about their comfort.
Tip #8: Calls to Action are important
When you want your readers to do something, you should be clear in explaining what they need to do. If you add a clickable button in your email, support it with action words and highlight the button with a different color. Instead of writing “Click here” it’s more efficient to name the button as “Get a free sample now!”. This way, the reader will have a clear reason to perform the action you expect them to.
A successful call to action should meet the following conditions:
- include an appealing image that follows your brand’s vision and mission
- keep the wording clean and clear, and try to have less than five words in your CTA
- use words that trigger emotions such as free, new, proven, easy
- place the CTA in the place where it makes the most sense in the context
- use a different color for your CTA than the rest of the text
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Tip #9: Help your subscribers contact you easier
Receiving emails from “no-reply” addresses is one of the most annoying things for any reader. How can the client get in touch with you if your email address starts with “no-reply”? One simple example would be that such an email address cannot be added in the contacts list.
A more successful strategy would be creating a shared inbox and sending your emails from addresses such as blog@yourdomain.com. Thus, you encourage your prospects to reply to you. Apart from showing your recipients that you have dedicated resources to reply to their emails, setting up a separate email address will also help you separate your business emails from messages from prospects.
In case you lack resources for organizing an adequate customer care service, you should encourage your prospects to save “no-reply” emails that include confirmations, reminders, or transactional messages. Besides, you can use autoresponders and reply back to your prospects with contact resources such as an email address and phone number.
Tip #10: Show your recipients that you understand their needs
It’s clear and obvious that when you email to your prospects, you want to turn them into your clients. But why would someone prefer you over your competitor? First off, email recipients should feel they are important to you, and you understand their expectations. Instead of presenting the service features, focus on highlighting the benefits that the service can bring to your prospect, including the emotional side.
Tip #11: The first sentence is highly important
The first sentence will tell your reader whether he/she should continue reading your email or skip it. It’s not enough to convince your recipient to open the email with an intriguing subject line. He/she should also read it until the end.
For example, you can open your email with a quick question that targets the reader’s needs. Or create a last call to make the reader understand that he/she should take advantage of your offer.
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The example presented above follows the AIDA model. AIDA stands for Attention Interest Desire Action. The first lines start by grabbing the recipient’s attention with an intriguing question. Then it continues by making the prospect get interested in the service. Also, these first sentences make the recipient want and buy the service right away to save the extra 10 hours each week.
Tip #12: Don’t forget about emotions
Your readers receive hundreds of emails daily from different companies that want to sell them something. A winning strategy to improve your response rate would be to include emotion in your emails. Statistics show that the emails that expose emotions (not necessarily positive ones!) tend to draw out between 5 to 15% more reactions than those written in a neutral tone.
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Final Tips
Getting your recipients to open your emails and respond to them takes you closer to finalizing a sale. While building a successful email marketing campaign might seem a big deal, you shouldn’t get discouraged and keep testing your strategy until you meet your response rate objectives. With each response that you get, your brand, content, and services become more relevant and better known by your target audience, don’t you think so?
Author’s bio. Jessica Fender is a copywriter and blogger with a background in marketing and sales. She enjoys sharing her experience with like-minded professionals who aim to provide customers with high-quality services. You can check her last review of TutorDoctor.
