As businesses continue to shift their budgets from traditional marketing to digital marketing, it has become clear that digital marketing is the most affordable way to reach your target audience.
Not only is this form of marketing more affordable, but it’s often more effective as well. To stay ahead of your competition, you need to start using digital marketing methods such as social media, website design, and search engine optimization. It’s important to also consider how effective a digital marketing technique is. Don’t get too caught up in which form of digital marketing is the cheapest.
Digital marketing is a form of marketing that utilizes electronic devices such as computers, mobile phones, and tablets to reach a target audience. This type of marketing is continually evolving, so businesses need to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies to remain competitive. Some of the most popular digital marketing methods include social media, website design, and search engine optimization.
One of the most important things to remember about digital marketing is that it should be tailored to the needs of your target audience. For example, if you’re targeting millennials, then you’ll want to use social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram. If you’re targeting businesses, then you’ll want to focus on website design and search engine optimization. Many digital marketing tactics can be started for little to no cost.
If you’re interested in learning more about Digital Marketing in general, then you should read our previous blog on it here.
If you want to find out what is the cheapest form of digital marketing, read on.
The cheapest and most effective form of digital marketing is Email Marketing.
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that utilizes electronic mail to reach a target audience. It’s one of the most effective and efficient ways to reach your customers, and it’s becoming increasingly popular since people are spending more and more time online. To take advantage of email marketing, you need to build a list of email subscribers and then send them regular emails with content that interests them.
What makes email marketing so affordable is the fact that writing and sending emails is free! You shouldn’t need to spend any money to get started, and chances are you already have all the necessary skills as well. It always helps to brush up on email marketing etiquette though.
What also makes email marketing so special is that, in addition to being free, many of the tools used for managing your email lists are also free. Tools like Constant Contact, Mailchimp, or Hubspot (that’s our personal favorite), won’t cost you anything but will be a huge help in making sure you’re sending your emails to the right people and avoiding sending spam.
It can be hard to identify what you should be sending your audience as well as how often you should be sending that info. You’ll want to limit self-promotions and direct sales emails to at the most once a week. Instead, you should focus on primarily sending emails that provide value to your audience.
For instance, at our business, Fisher Tech Solutions LLC, we may consider sending this article to prospective customers. There are plenty of benefits to us doing this. A prospective customer who may have been interested in our services but has been unsure of our expertise, may find the information included in this article of a good quality and decide to sign up. Alternatively, a prospective customer who has been planning on working with us but has been busy might see us in their inbox and be reminded to sign up for services.
If you don’t have articles to send your customers, no worries, you could send them information on upcoming sales, in-person events, or special coupons and offers!
The important thing is to make emails valuable for the customer to open. It is very difficult to get customers to give you their email addresses to begin with. If you fail to provide value to those customers who have taken that step, or worse, if you send spam to those customers, then there is a high likelihood they may unsubscribe and possibly even stop doing business with you.
Keep an eye on your own inbox. You’ll notice there are some companies you dread receiving emails from. Try understanding why you don’t enjoy receiving emails from these businesses and how you could make sure yours don’t fall into the same traps.
The flexibility of email marketing makes it suitable for every small business. A simple single-segment email list with a monthly newsletter will be enough for some small business owners. Others may want to segment their email audience by location, gender, average purchase size, open rate, or various other identifying behaviors or demographics. We recommend keeping things simple in the beginning. It can be useful to use a CRM (like HubSpot or Mailchimp) for simple segmentation exercises, like tagging past customers so you can see your open rate between new and existing customers.
Another technique you will want to try early on is A/B testing. A/B testing is a method of comparing two variants of a piece of content to see which one performs better. It’s an essential tool for email marketers, as it allows you to test different subject lines, email body copy, and even call-to-action buttons to see which variation leads to the most opens, clicks, and conversions. Doing these tests early on will help you to identify which emails you may want to re-use in the future and which emails you should consider not sending again.
Don’t forget that emails are reusable. You can save your best performing emails to use again in the future. You could also consider setting up a campaign of welcome emails that automatically send as users sign-up for your email list. These are often referred to as Nurture Campaigns.
The best affordable way to start digital marketing is by using email. It’s free, easy for anyone to use and the flexibility makes it perfect for any size business. Again, the key is making your emails valuable, so that people want your email in their inbox! If this sounds intimidating, let us know–we are ready to partner with you to help grow your small business today!
Fill out our receive a quote, tell us everything you want for your business, and we’ll help you get started!
