Online marketing on social media platforms has opened up new and cheaper avenues for small businesses to reach more customers. But even those platforms are not getting crowded and need more marketing dollar to get some traction.
Small business owners and marketers need to rise above the noise in social media space and look for effective marketing channels that can also fit in their budget.
Email is old but still gold
Email is not as hyped as social media platforms. But in the backdrop, it is not only active, but thriving and growing every day.
Every day hundreds of thousands of new people are connecting to the internet – many with their mobile devices. One of the very first tool that these people will start using is Email.
Cheaper than online ads
If you do it properly, email marketing can be completely free of cost! It at all, you only pay for some emailing tools and prospect lists. But even then it turns out to be cheaper than online advertising.
So it doesn’t cost much to send out emails. But the bigger challenge is to get people to actually reach them.
Scheduled email campaigns
Timing your emails perfectly is important to improve the opening rate. That's where scheduled email campaigns can be helpful.
More importantly, you can also schedule particular emails to be sent at appropriate time to a customer, to nudge your relationship even further using a series of emails.
This is possible with cold email marketing, since it allows your to track opening rate, clicks, website visits, logins and purchases done by a single unique email address. That makes it very easy to track the engagement of your cold emails and their effectiveness.
Personalization
Unlike Google ads, when you send an email to someone, you know exactly who that prospect is. In all likelihood, you have their name, company name, interests etc. in a mailing list spreadsheet.
This presents as a great opportunity for personalized communication. Personalized messaging is very effective in B2B marketing & sales, where you want to build a relationship with the customer.
Using cold email marketing for a small business
You don't necessarily need a big marketing budget to get new customers. Simple tools like email can help you in a long way.
Cold email marketing is highly suited marketing channel for small businesses. Here are some pointers to make sure your email campaigns are effective.
- Avoid buying mailing lists. Instead, invest in organically growing your mailing list.
- Send contextual emails. This helps with opening rates, improves the sending score and helps you get past the spam filters in the long run.
- Personalize your cold emails to make them effective.
- Schedule your emails so that they don't get ignored.
