March 6, 2019

4 Reasons Why You Need an Email Marketing Services Provider for Your SMB

Reading time about 7 min

It’s no secret that fast customer acquisition and revenue growth are among the leading priorities for most SMBs – but they also pose some of the greatest challenges to sustainable success.

Email marketing has been proven time and time again to be one of the most effective tools for converting prospects and maintaining customer engagement throughout the entire lifecycle.

In an effort to accelerate growth velocity, it can be tempting for business owners to focus on rapid acquisition and short-term payoff. But to achieve sustainable growth, you need a long-term marketing strategy dedicated to meaningful conversions, strong customer loyalty, and high-quality revenue.

The right email marketing services provider can empower you to achieve just this. Read on to find out why.

Already convinced ? Read our article comparing the best email marketing services

1 – Build Awareness

At this stage of your company lifecycle awareness is everything. It’s likely that only a fraction your potential customers know much about your business or your products. So, if you’re not going to tell them, who is?

You need to start building a community of loyal followers and share regular updates with them – only including content that’s valuable, of course. Newsletters are the perfect way to grow this following and increase awareness with your target audience.

Remember, while sharing product information is important to let your potential customers understand what you offer, you need to start telling your brand story too.

Who are you? Where is your business going? Who are your employees? What is the value that you can provide?

You can achieve this through compelling company updates that keep your brand front of mind and keep your existing and potential customers in the loop.

It’s important to make them feel part of your story as your business grows.

2 – Look professional

Your company may still be in the early stages, but that doesn’t mean you should compromise the look and feel of your brand.

You need to keep your communications elegant and sleek from the very beginning in order to build credibility with your target audience.

With so many brands vying for your audience’s attention with beautiful, mobile-optimised emails, poor design just doesn’t cut it anymore. At best you’ll miss out on an open, at worst you’ll seriously hurt your company’s reputation.

Here at Sendinblue, we make it easy for you to create responsive emails with our drag and drop email design tool and library of email templates. Email templates allow you to quickly and easily create well-designed email newsletters to engage your customers – no HTML or CSS knowledge necessary.

With a variety of templates and customisation options to hand, you can find the perfect template to match your brand and keep your communications consistent.

Clean, professional-looking design is essential if you want to catch your prospect’s eye and gain more customers.  

3 – Avoid getting lost in spam

Many small to medium size businesses worry about the cost and time involved in getting set up with an email marketing services provider and choose to send out their own emails blasts instead to dodge the effort and expense.

Before you carry out this DIY approach, you need to stop and consider the long term benefits and rewards of opting for a provider.

Email marketing services are designed for sending high volume email campaigns. Gmail and Outlook are not. Think of all the missed opportunities to gain a new customer or upsell an existing one if your emails are getting lost in spam folders.

You want to optimise email deliverability and open rates by reaching your target audience in their inbox with the right message and at the right time.

Many providers offer free trials without commitment. This allows you to test out the software to ensure it’s intuitive, effective, and the right fit for your business before you commit.

4 – Build an engaged contact list

For SMBs who are looking to scale quickly, growing an email list can feel like a painstakingly slow process. It can be tempting to purchase or rent email lists to gain access to a large number of potential new customers and speed up growth.

This can be a costly mistake that will compromise the growth and reputation of your company for many reasons:

  1. You don’t know anything about the people or businesses on the email list, so you have no way to personalise content to make your messages relevant.
  2. Few people will open your unsolicited emails and many will report them as spam, hurting your reputation as an email sender.
  3. It will be very hard to get a reputable email marketing provider to accept you as a customer with a bad sending history.
  4. Depending on the laws in your country, non-opt-in tactics are illegal according to the GDPR.

The point of having a business is that you provide value to your customers by solving a problem. Engaging the right people with your solution is the only way to guarantee long-term, sustainable success.

You can achieve this by growing your content list with an effective email listing building strategy based on customers and prospects who are actually interested in what you have to offer.

Trust and credibility are key ingredients when it comes to forging genuine customer relationships – and delivering relevant, meaningful content is the key to earning this trust.

If you start working on building your email list in the early stages of your company, you won’t have any problem generating meaningful engagement from your subscribers.

Here are just some of the ways to start building your email list:

  • Define buyer personas early so you have a clear understanding of the needs and interests of your target audience. This way you can start developing relevant content and messaging to engage your existing and potential customers.
  • Create clear and strategically placed sign-up forms across your website with a compelling call-to-action. Sign-up forms are one of the most important barriers to address for gathering new subscribers, so you need to get it right if you want to grow your contact list.
  • Make sure you achieve the right balance with your opt-in forms. When designing your forms, include only the necessary form fields to gather information to segment your contact list. Asking for too much information is a big deterrent for subscribers.
  • Define your email marketing strategy based on the complete lifecycle of your subscriber. Engaging design, compelling content and targeted contact list segments are key considerations here.
  • Provide value through helpful gated resources and tools, such as ebooks, guides, or free demos. The value exchange provides users with a more convincing reason to hand over their data.

Here at Sendinblue, we can help you to collect and manage your contacts with simple, customisable, GDPR-compliant subscription forms that can be integrated directly into the design of your website.

Our powerful subscription editor allows you to personalise forms to match your website and customise the content and user-experience to suit your needs.  

Growing and managing an engaged contact list can be one of the most challenging steps in your email marketing strategy.

But with the right email marketing services provider, you can quickly scale your efforts and start creating high-quality email campaigns to optimise conversions and generate the customer loyalty you need to drive sustainable success.

You may also be interested in: 7 Email Marketing Best Practices to Succeed in 2019

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