Top Ways to Utilize Email Marketing

How Effective is Email Marketing?

Email Marketing has been around for a while, and businesses still to this date use it as an effective means of customer acquisition, retention, and informative marketing. With good content, and a proper list, email marketing can be used to successfully increase sales, growth, and build positive customer relationships.

Sales Pitch

Whatever industry you may operate in, email marketing has a myriad of benefits for increasing sales volume. Sure, the majority of your email list won’t purchase a service or product, but that can be said about any mechanism of digital marketing (i.e. targeted search engine marketing). The most important thing to keep in mind is ROI, and for email marketing, statistically speaking, the ROI is $38 for every $1 spent on running campaigns. Beyond that, there are tons of free email marketing platforms on the market, so spending is only necessary in certain cases.

Customer Retention

One of the fundamentals of any business operation is not only acquiring a customer, but retaining them for the future. Repeat customers are extremely profitable for any business and a good way to retain customers is to ensure they don’t forget about your company. You can communicate with your customers via email marketing on a monthly, bi-weekly, or quarterly basis, depending on the product or service being offered. Customers usually appreciate personalized emails especially during times like birthdays, and major holidays. This will also make your brand seem more customer-friendly.

Which Email Marketing Platform is Right For Me?

When choosing an email marketing platform, there are a lot of factors to consider. It depends entirely on your industry, scope of campaigns, budget etc.

Some of our favorite email marketing platforms are listed below:

  • MailChimp – One of the largest email marketing platforms offering a variety of services and plans to fit every budget, including a free plan that allows you to maintain a list of under 2,000 emails.
  • Constant Contact – Allows you to create create effective email marketing and other online marketing campaigns to meet your business goals.
  • GetResponse Create exciting landing pages, email marketing campaigns, and more. GetResponse is an all around solution that has tons of functionality for all types of marketing campaigns.

Most email marketing platforms on the market have either a free trial, or a free account with limited functionality. Test it out and see what works best for your company!

Need help with your email marketing campaigns? Operatio Marketing has helped tons of businesses around North America grow their brand and increase their sales with email marketing.

 

Top 3 Influencer Marketing Trends of 2018

Influencer Marketing has really shot up in the past few years. With the rise of social media marketing, influencers are being leveraged in a multitude of ways to promote and acquire loyal customers. As a result, we’ve put together a list of some awesome trends we noticed in 2018 that will help you kick-start your 2019 influencer marketing strategies. Enjoy!

B2B Influencer Marketing

How great would it be if someone who people actually listen to, spoke about your product and/or service?

The benefit of influencer marketing for a B2B operation, is that you have the ability to build long term relationships with your customers.

The Influencer Marketing Hub mentions that 55% of marketers believe they get better customers from influencer marketing. That’s Huge! There’s nothing better than getting a long-term customer…foreseeable ARR is everything when you scale.

Starting with small groups of targeted and specific B2B influencers will help you accelerate building deep relationships with your new customers. As the influencer grows, so will you.

Influencer Marketing Technology and Solutions

Currently, there is no one solutions that covers everything from discovery, connecting, engaging, recruiting, reviewing, and measuring the success of a potential influencer marketing campaign. Notwithstanding, on a regular basis there are new solutions coming out that individually solve each and every pain point.

The development of influencer marketing and the increase of the micro-influencers (an influencer with less than 100,000 followers) are the main fundamental reasons for rising Influencer Marketing solutions.

Check out these cool Influencer Marketing Technologies that we found incredibly helpful in 2018:

  • AspirelQ – Self-service platform that offers access to over 150,000 influencers across major social media platforms
  • Upfluence – With a focus on bloggers, Upfluence changes the way companies can plan, create, and deliver on their content marketing strategies
  • Influence.co – Create exciting, fresh content with influential creators that drive new followers and customers to your brand

Influencer Marketing and the Customer Journey

Micro-Influencers, Macro-Influencers, and Mega Influencers.

On a year-over-year basis there are more and more types of influencers that are being discovered, all of which have various benefits along different periods in the customers journey. A huge trend we see happening towards the end of 2018 and continuing in 2019 is the rise of merging different influencer types throughout the customer journey.

These integrated influencer marketing strategies will weave together Micro-Influencers, Macro-Influencers and Mega Influencers along with other word-of mouth strategies such as loyalty, advocacy and referral programs in order to generate leads and help convert customers faster.

Building relevant content touch points along the entire customer journey will help target the right customers, thus resulting in significant increase in customer loyalty.

 

Top 4 Tips for Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management is an integral part in your customer journey. The best
customers are referral customers because A. They don’t cost any money to acquire and B. They
have more loyalty than a brand-new customer because they were referred. 88% of people trust
online reviews as much as they trust their best friends’ recommendations.

1. Google My Business

You and your friends are looking for a new Chinese restaurant to check out. You go on Google and search up “Top Chinese Restaurants Near Me.” Google then proceeds to give you a list of restaurants. As you’re scrolling, you take into consideration the pictures, proximity, and most importantly what people are saying about the restaurant. You’re more inclined to go to a restaurant that has 4.5/5 stars on Google as opposed to a restaurant that has 2.5/5 stars. 80 percent of people choose to go elsewhere if they read bad reviews of your business online. That’s the benefit of Google My Business. You’re able to make sure that your reputation relative to other competitors is great by leveraging reviews, pictures, chat features, and content.

2. Leverage Social Media Interactions

In today’s day and age, companies are lucky enough to be able to communicate with their customers through various social media outlets. Whether it’s through direct messaging, articles/blogs, videos, or competitions you can promote a consistent message that your customers can relate to.

3. Listen to Customers

Your customers are the best people to help you in improving your services and/or products. Getting their opinion and acting on it will help your business adjust to customer needs. But, how will you be able to track all of your customer reviews? Especially since there are so many platforms they can leave it on. Lucky for you, there are a bunch of tools out there such as Google alerts and social mention that can send push notifications each time a review is left. Never miss a review again!

4. Encourage Customer Reviews

If a customer has something bad to say, they will go out of their way to spread the message on various digital outlets. Customers who have a bad experience are two to three times more likely to write a negative review than customers who had a great experience are to post a positive review. That’s why it’s incredibly important to encourage all customers to post reviews. By following these tips, you will have the ability to not only create a strong digital reputation, but also restore a tarnished one.