What Is Considered A Small Business
Is a business considered a small business based on the amount of money it makes? Or is it based on the number of employees in all of its business locations?
The definition of a small business corresponds to which country you are in.
For example, in India, to be considered a small business, your business should earn you revenue of no more than Rs. 75 crore, and in the U.S., it should be no more than $40 million.
Now that we know whether your business comes under the small business category let's look at some problems you might be facing as a small business owner.
Small Business Marketing Pain Points
- There aren't enough resources to create marketing strategies.
- Financial constraints on hiring a marketing team.
- Inadequate time to perform marketing activities
Do these problems sound familiar to you? What if I tell you that all of these can be combated by using email marketing as your marketing channel?
Yes, email marketing is all for small businesses. It's affordable, effective, and a great way to increase your ROI.
Small Business And Email Marketing
Email marketing holds tremendous significance for small businesses, mainly because email marketing has the potential to jumpstart any business's sales, customer acquisition, retention and also helps in improving your brand awareness. All of that can be achieved within your budget.
Email can provide a high return on investment, reach a large number of people, and help you retain customers. For these reasons, it is a top-rated marketing channel among small businesses.
Email can also assist you in understanding more about your viewers and growing your business. Email is a two-way street, and it is the closest thing to having a direct conversation with your customers, short of speaking to them in person. However, face-to-face discussions are time-consuming, uncontrollable, and risky. You might tend to make errors in a direct conversation with another person. In contrast, email provides a controlled platform from which you can get valuable data analysis about your campaigns' performance.
There is so much email marketing software in the market, and some like Mailchimp have grown so much that they have started to focus more on big enterprises. Fortunately, there are alternatives to Mailchimp that you can count on as a small business owner!
And these alternatives will help you combat your marketing pain points:
Email Marketing Strategies Are Simple And Straightforward
You don't require a lot of resources to set up email marketing strategies. Any person with no experience in marketing can read knowledge-based materials available online to get started with email marketing. This channel has been around us forever with no decline in usage for one reason: easy use.
Even the email marketing tools are designed in a user-friendly way. Most of them have pre-built email templates, pre-written email copies, and workflows. Most times, you don't even need to set your workflows by yourself. All you have to do is get the help of support personnel from the email marketing tool you choose to use.
Email Marketing Is Affordable
I cannot highlight this enough. Unlike other marketing channels, email marketing tools are cost-effective. Plus, you won't even have to hire an entire marketing team for your small business if you have access to email automation.
Email automation workflows can be set up once in a few months and then set to communicate with subscribers automatically. And so, you don't need to worry about the lack of human resources.
In addition, some email marketing tools don't charge by the number of emails you send but rather by the number of active subscribers. This is not the case with social media marketing or TV commercials. You will have to pay whether the viewer was active or not.
You can create an email campaign that delivers ROI with an effective email marketing strategy, email marketing software, and a spirit to win. However, there are some upfront expenses to consider when getting started and building an email list.
Email marketing can be as cheap as you want it to be. As your company expands, so will its email requirements. The majority of email platforms allow you to upgrade and grow your plan as necessary. And for a small business with less than 1000 active subscribers, it might cost you somewhere between $15 to $40 depending on the email marketing software you use.
Save Time With Email Automation
Wouldn't it be ideal if your email marketing campaigns did their work for you? Using email marketing automation can do just that. It eliminated the need to manually type in content every time and manually send them each time to people.
Subscribe to an email marketing tool with advanced automation features, choose email templates that you like, and then edit them according to your brand's identity, and finally set the workflow to be triggered automatically whenever a person takes the desired action on your website.
After this, you don't have to look back and worry about manually hitting the send button every time. Email marketing automation is the future of email marketing; it has been consistently getting smarter. Proper planning and implementation can help save time by eliminating monotonous tasks, saving time and money.
Still think you need more employees, more budgets for marketing, and more time to expand your marketing? I bet you don't!
