Small business owners realize a balanced approach between social media and email marketing is by far their most cost effective promotional advertising expenditure. There is no print or broadcast medium that can compare with the cost efficiency of email marketing and at a time when mobile web enabled devices are being adopted by the majority of the population.
Since your newsletter campaign can reach an overwhelming number of your customers, email marketing allows you to segment your audience to an extent where your readers will think you've composed that newsletter just for them!
Conventional media is One To Many
There are some critical aspects you need to master which will ease your migration from old to new promotional media. Email and social media marketing are quite different from print, outdoor, radio, and television ads. In the older media you placed one monolithic placement out there and relied on the exposure which the ad would receive to get your message out to the public.
A single commercial on the last Super Bowl cost $3 million, but it reached 111 million Americans. Similarly, if you place an ad for your small business on your local newspaper or broadcast station, you are still in the one to many mode. You have one message going out to a (hopefully) large number of people.
Segment your audience to deliver precisely focused content
Email and social media marketing varies from this advertising model in that it becomes essentially a one to one conversational mode of promotion. Throughout the age of advertising, it has been a fundamental concept that word of mouth is by far the most effective form of promotion.
Think of email marketing as an online type of word of mouth. You can precisely identify (or segment) your audience according to how old they are, where they live, what they've bought from you previously, or any number of different criteria. Then you can deliver exactly the type of message that suits who they are.
Zip codes reveal your customer's income bracket
By proposing specific products or services in a way that is most familiar to your audience, you'll obtain the best results. You will definitely design your email content differently if your audience is in their sixties than if they were in their teens. Males and females respond to different content as do people who live in different regions.
Just from the customer's zip code you can ascertain an amazing amount of information. If your customer is in zip code 10153 then they are likely to be quite different than the customer in zip code 75880. The former is in Manhattan and has an average annual income of nearly seven million dollars, while the latter is in Tennessee Colony, Texas and their average income is just $430 a year! If you're selling Rolex watches or Louis Vuitton handbags, which of those two zip codes are you going to choose?
Manolo Blahniks for your affluent zips, cheap sneakers for your disadvantaged zips
Not only can you select zip codes to exclude from specific newsletter content, but you can cater to particular ranges as well. You can have multiple variations of your newsletter which can go to different segments. If you were segmenting by zip code income, then you would promote your Manolo Blahnik shoes to your highest income group, your Ugg boots to your middle ranges, and your cheap Chinese-made running shoes to your lowest income prospects.
Email marketing is a customized form of communication which to the reader seems like you're speaking directly to them... and that's what makes it so successful. Segmentation is both an art and a science, and it is one that small business owners should master in order to derive the greatest benefit from the one to one model of email marketing.