What is the importance of the email? Does it even matter? Why should every business use email?

All of these questions will face everyone when using the Email.
The thing is 95% of U.S. online consumers use email for communication and business. We believe it’s the best communication medium to provide a personal, and direct conversation.
Social communication is on the verge of evolving, and predicted to take over email, but it still has a long way to go. Email is much too important to just be “taken over.”
Email is the best means of communication in a professional manner, and can also be friendly as well.
Also, the data regarding email usage is extraordinary.

It’s a fact that email usage is not only a great way to communicate for consumers, but business use email everyday to reach new, existing, and future customers.
Email is conquering over social by being able to deliver private, transactional messages, which result in being able to help increase customer retention, and a larger profit margin.
Personally, I use email every single day, and like to respond immediately when I receive an email that needs a reply as soon as possible; it’s part of my “getting things done” plan.
As an online consumer, I can’t resist checking my email, and use it more than ever when I’m on the go through mobile email.
Mobile email has featured as a great technology, and is standard for all smartphones.

Now, The importance of Email Marketing for your Internet Marketing.

Let’s put it simply. Email marketing is a vibrant and powerful way to connect with people. Bringing it home, think about your own experiences. Do you even know anyone who doesn’t have an email address? You probably receive a number of emails each week, you read them, get inspired by them and even look forward to the next one. Email is a big part of our lives.

Email marketing is also a very personal way of reaching your target customers. Messages from your friends and family are sitting next to email updates from your company.
That’s why email marketing works at it’s best when it is personalised. Email can be tailored to customer actions so that every communication is relevant to their interest. You can cover topics like modifications in your company, challenges, request feedback to your customer, this list is endless. With 5.5 billion users, email isn’t going anywhere.

(we can make it PDF OR a part of it)

So, let us give you some main reason why Email Marketing is a channel that shouldn’t be ignored.

⦁ More effective than social media especially for customer acquisition, we can’t deny that social media is an extremely important component in any business’ marketing strategy, also it is a great channel for interacting with your audience and strengthening your personal relationships with them. And because of that, it is an important first step towards reaching your ultimate goal, the conversion.

But when it comes to turning people into members, customers or supporters, email marketing is the way to go.
A number of studies from 2013 found that customer acquisition via email marketing has increased in the four years preceding 2013. Email marketing then already accounted for nearly all customer acquisitions that occurred online.

⦁ Economic and Cost Effective, It’s easy, effective, and inexpensive. Email marketing allows business owners to reach a large number of consumers at a rate of nearly nothing per message.

For small-business owners on a budget, this makes it a better choice than traditional marketing channels like TV, radio, or paid Ads. A joint study Research found that 85% of US retailers consider email marketing one of the most effective customer acquisition tactics.

Even with the explosion of all sorts of new technology and social networks, marketers keep coming back to email.

⦁ For ten years in a row, email is the channel generating the highest ROI for marketers. According to researchers every $1 spent, email marketing generates $50 in ROI.

Differentiate to traditional marketing efforts where printing, postage etc. can take up a lot of cost for your direct mail campaigns. With emails, you are still able to create the same imagery with the added benefit of having follow up information instantly available with one click to your website.
Just as importantly, with the correct maintenance of an email list, the cost benefits increase as does the ROI through the closer relationship established with the recipients. Together with the higher response rates that email marketing attracts. Therefore, you get more positive responses, more quickly and at a lower unit cost! A Win-win situation!

⦁ Personal and Customisable, in email marketing, what you’re really doing is dividing up your audience into lists, and sending each list a tailored email message that resonates with your reader and can provide them with something of value.

When you write a post for one of your social media channels, you address your audience as a whole, But by using your email marketing software correctly, it allows you to address people individually by name, split certain topics only for certain members of your list and eventually arrive privately in their personal inbox.

Email does not have to be SPAM, and it should never be! It can be used thoughtfully to build loyalty and trust in your brand.
Email marketing is important for building relationships with prospects, leads, current customers, and even past customers because it gives you a chance to speak directly to them, in their inbox, at a time that is suitable for them.

⦁ Action, whether you realise it or not, everybody is trained to do something with an email reply, forward, click-through, sign-up, or even straight buying.
Email is transactional by nature and you can use it to direct traffic to your website and eventually drive sales.

As you develop your small business or start-up marketing strategy as a whole, using email will allow you to see results straight away.
This means not just sending out newsletters, but also using email automation based on triggers of your customers.
Transactional emails have 8x more opens and clicks than any other type of email and can generate 6x more revenue.

⦁ Measurable, There’s no guesswork in email marketing. When you use any email marketing software, you can track who opened your email, which links were clicked, and how many people unsubscribed.

You can easily get a picture of how your email campaigns are performing, make adjustments and improve your effectiveness.
Email marketing metrics are important to remember as you monitor and measure your internet marketing strategy as a whole.

⦁ Mobile devices allow people to check their email constantly, because mobile devices have become so common, people are checking their emails all the time in line at Starbucks, during their office commute, in the waiting room at the dentist’s office, at the mall, everywhere.
Some people think that with the growing popularity of social media platforms, email should be forgotten and may be pushed to the side.

Studies in 2014 reports that 91% of people use smartphones to access their email. This compared to 75% of the people who use their smartphones for social networking.
Not using email as part of your internet marketing strategy means you are missing out on a channel that a majority of the world uses!

Start Now! With a few simple steps you will find out why email marketing is important in your small business internet marketing strategy.
Get out your list of people who want to hear from you and keep in mind that you don’t want to be a spammer! use an email service that works, write a crafty email message that is friendly and helpful, and hit SEND!

How long do you ponder over emails when using your mobile?

Your digital marketing strategy is the series of actions that help you achieve your company goals through carefully selected online marketing channels. These channels include paid, earned, and owned media, and can all support a common campaign around a particular line of business.

There is two different perspective, the knowledge and the process

Let’s learn about the knowledge

According to ‘Managing Digital Marketing’ study by Smart Insights Company, “46% of brands don’t have a defined digital marketing strategy, while 16% do have a strategy but haven’t yet integrated it into their marketing activity.”
But if you don’t have a plan in place how can you expect to grow and innovate, to measure meaningful results and to learn from past mistakes?
You need to stop panicking about next year or next month and start crafting a plan that can pack a powerful punch.

Here are the 5 most important selected steps that you,
“the decision maker” should take to guarantee that your digital marketing efforts create a real impact on your results:

1- Set the Objective

⦁ Define your business’ overall mission first, your digital marketing mission must fit into your major plan.

⦁ Know the answer to this question: what is the rule objective you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve
This is your mission!

⦁ Get specific with your KPIs ( A measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives) by identifying the figures you will be held accountable for achieving.

⦁ Be realistic with your KPIs by analysing your previous digital marketing efforts first this will ensure you aim for a positive increase on your current results, while helping you to avoid setting too high expectations.

⦁ Identify a method to help you measure each of your KPIs like Google Analytics to measure your conversions.

2- Learn from your mistakes by analysing your past

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Analyzing your digital marketing strategy’s past success and failures can help focus you on setting the best KPIs for your business.

Choose a time period you’d like to analyse and set this time period as the same time you plan for your new marketing strategy
So, decide on whether you’re going to analyse the previous year, quarter or month.

How do we analyze?

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1- Define the time period you would like to analyse and set your Analytics calendar to match this timeframe.

2- Try out Google’s Benchmarking Reports in your Analytics account to compare your progress to your competitors.

3- Analyse your competitors’ marketing strategy to create an analysis spreadsheet of their online activities.

4- Always ask yourself this question at regular intervals:
Is there anything else I need to analyse that I haven’t thought of before? For example: should I be testing the types of images I use or the times I post my content?

3- Speak your target customers language

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Remember Who You’re Talking to!
Don’t let the planning take away from the people you’re trying to reach.
You already know who your audience are (If you don’t start now!!)
but sometimes they’re the first thing a digital marketer can forget among the KPI setting.
You’re not going to make this mistake, well not this time.
Instead put your audience at the heart of your digital marketing strategy,
care for their emotional needs and satisfy their desires.
But how? Through the creation of well condition out and well thought out personas.

How do we develop useful personas?

1- Start with the basics and note down all the demographic information you know about your target consumer.
For example: age, gender and location.

2- Next step? dig a little deeper and Identify the problems you can help your target persona solve. be their Superhero.

3- Take a dive into their emotional desires, goals, aspirations and fears and document all of the factors that could make them tick (think clearly about their conscious and unconscious desires).

4- You also can dive deep into the audience reports to identify key characteristics of your target persona like age, sex, career, etc.

5- When creating your personas this is the perfect time to identify the people who will be of influence to them.

These will be the influences your marketing strategy should target.

4- Stick to your budget & Identify your means

Three main things are important for identifying your means:
these are your budget, your digital channels and your team
It is important to evaluate all of your resources before deciding on what else you might need for the next term.

And how do we Identify Your Means?

First your budget:

1- Define your total digital marketing budget.

2- Take a look at the historic data of what has worked before.
For example: have any specific channels brought you quality leads at a low cost?

3- Decide whether you will use paid promotion.
For example Adwords or paid ads on social media.

4- Assign a specific portion of the budget for each digital channel you want to use for paid promotion.
Go deeply into your analysing to help you evaluate the most cost effective digital channels with the largest reach and conversions and the lowest Cost Per Click.

5- If a certain element of your paid promotion strategy isn’t bringing you the results you desire.
Reconsider it and go invest the assigned budget figure into the channel that brings you the best results.

Second your team:

1- Look at your current team and estimate what you are capable of achieving.
You must be realistic and guarantee that no one will be over stressed or over worked.

2- Identify whether you need to hire more people and whether you have the means to do so.

3- Determine whether all of your digital marketing activity will be covered by your team or you’ll need help from an outsourced third party agency.

4- Get each of your team members to review digital marketing activity and brainstorm ideas for future marketing strategy.
The more autonomy and control your employee has in their role the more they’ll be on board with your new plan.

Third your channels:

1- Review your current digital marketing channels and decide which channels to keep and whether you’d like to develop in any new ones.

2- Clearly define what each digital channel is trying to achieve.

3- Make sure you have a KPI attached to each of your digital channels.

5- Make the plan and don’t stick to It

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“Create the plan and don’t stick to it? But, but, what does that mean?” Before the panic let me explain ..
Your plan will never be perfect from the beginning, not every assumption you make is going to be correct.
Although you’ve constructed a plan based on a set of insightful assumptions and analysis, you still can’t predict exactly how your customers will behave.
It is, therefore, it’s a must to continuously measure and monitor the performance of your digital marketing strategy and to change elements where needed.

Here is how we create a digital marketing calendar:

1- Create your timeline and share it with your team members and allow them to edit it where necessary.

2- Highlight the campaigns you’ll create and promote throughout the year and allocate a timeframe for each.

3- Study the digital channels needed to ensure the success for each campaign.

4- Review your marketing strategy and characterize changes needed by
creating a measurement and monitoring plan.

5- Check the success of the individual elements of your digital marketing strategy at continuous period.

6- But if something is not working (i.e. you’re not achieving the KPIs you’ve set out)
Try to identify what is not working,
For example is it the time you’re posting content or the taglines you’re using for your ads?

7- Try something new and revisit your previous analysis, personas and budget allocation.

8- Inspire a clearly defined KPI for your new project.

Important Note:

Not all digital marketing strategies are created equal. Simply building a website, posting sporadically on various channels is not enough to get the required results. Your team should be willing to go an extra mile to sharpen their skills, serve your customers whenever they stumble across a problem, and are willing to think outside of the box.

“What is the most useful step you did in digital marketing strategy?”

The difference between sales and marketing is:

Marketing informs and attracts leads and prospects to your company and product or service. Sales, on the other hand, works directly with prospects to reinforce the value of the company’s solution to convert prospects into customers. Sounds simple?

While these two business functions are different, they both share a common goal: to attract prospects and convert them to customers, ultimately generating revenue.
The key difference between sales and marketing. Marketers are the ones who create the idea that a salesperson will sell. Then, marketers conduct research to find what customers’ needs are to determine what their needs are.

So, what do these business units do, and can they work together? Let’s clarify the difference between sales and marketing even more, and learn how to align the two of them in this article.

Sales is the description of the activities that lead to the selling of services. Salespeople are responsible for managing relationships with potential clients and providing a solution for them that eventually leads to a sale.

On the other hand, marketing includes all activities that help spark interest in your business. Marketers use market research and analysis to understand the interests of potential customers. Marketing departments are responsible for running campaigns to attract people to the business’ brand, product, or service. Even if they will not buy at the end.
Marketing focuses its efforts on the general public or larger groups of people, while sales targets smaller groups of people or subsets of the general public.

How else do these two business functions differ?

We need to understand the core elements of each department, So we can create a partnership between marketing and sales.

Process

Whether you’re writing a marketing or sales plan, both must include details about the history of the company and its goals and initiatives. Then the plans dive into the aspects of the plan that are specific for each department.

• The marketing plan clarify what the product is, its price, who it’ll be sold to, and where it will be sold. This is also known as the 4Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. Goals are set, marketing channels are chosen, and a budget is made for the campaigns the marketing team plans to continue.
• Sales plans include details about the sales process, team structure, target market, and goals. In addition, the sales plan outlines the action plan, tools, and resources that will be used to hit these targets.

Goals

What are the key goals that marketing and sales set? Both departments have the main focus to generate revenue for the company.

• The main goal of marketing is to look at the big picture and promote the company, product or service, and brand. Marketing departments are responsible for how communicating the product fills customers’ needs and wants. And its goals are often longer term because campaigns can span over the course of many months.
• For sales, the focus is to hit quotas and sales volume goals and these tend to be shorter term. Sales goals are often measured month over month. Targets are defined, and sales management calculates how much their department, teams, and individual sales people need to sell to meet the overarching goal.

Tools and Resources

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Social media can also be leveraged by both business units. For marketing, social media can be used to promote content and for sales, it can be used as part of a social selling strategy.
Plus, there are tools that are specific to each department.

• Marketing Tools
  ⦁ Data reporting software
  ⦁ Project management tool
  ⦁ Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
  ⦁ Search engine optimization (SEO) tool
  ⦁ Content creation tool
• Sales Tools
  ⦁ Inventory and order management software
  ⦁ Meetings app
  ⦁ Invoicing software
  ⦁ Email management tool
  ⦁ Documents tool

The introduction of resources to a marketing or sales strategy is particularly dependent on new technology. For example: “live chat” is one of the newest tool that marketing and sales can use to develop relationships with customers. This type of personalized communication wasn’t possible until recently, and companies can adopt new software and technology as it’s created.

Strategies

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• Marketing teams can take different strategic approaches depending on the type of campaign and customer they’re targeting. Common marketing strategies include:
  ⦁ Blog marketing
  ⦁ Internet marketing
  ⦁ Video marketing
  ⦁ Search engine optimization
  ⦁ Print marketing
  ⦁ Social media marketing
  ⦁
• Similar to marketing strategies, sales methods can be diffrient depending on its industry, products, market, and target customer. Some of the most popular sales methodologies are:
  ⦁ Customer Centric Selling
  ⦁ Conceptual Selling
  ⦁ MEDDIC
  ⦁ SNAP Selling
  ⦁ SPIN Selling
  ⦁ Solution Selling
  ⦁ N.E.A.T. Selling
  ⦁ Inbound Selling
  ⦁ The Challenger Sale
  ⦁ The Sandler System

These sales strategies help a buyer to solve a problem, achieve a goal, or satisfy a need. And hopefully, sales team’s selling technique will lead to a sale and a new customer.

Alignment

So, how do we get rid of this marketing vs. sales storyline and create a partnership between the two? This can be done by aligning the two departments.

A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract that establishes a set of deliverables that one party has agreed to provide another. This is one of the best ways for marketing and sales form a partnership.

In the SLA, both departments will define their shared goals, identify the buyer personas or ideal client profile, and standardize lead definitions. It will also set protocol for lead management, and outline how sales and marketing performance will be measured.

When sales and marketing are aligned, the business is poised to attract and qualify more leads and generate more revenue. To learn more, check out this ultimate guide to sales strategy next.

From your point of view, what is the point where sales and marketing meet?