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How to create a marketing plan for your small business - build a brand, target customers and set prices that will maximise sales.

The internet has transformed business marketing. No matter what you do, the internet is likely to be at the heart of your marketing strategy.

Social media is firmly established as a marketing tool. Having a presence opens up new lines of communication with existing and potential customers.

Good advertising puts the right marketing message in front of the right people at the right time, raising awareness of your business.

Customer care is at the heart of all successful companies. It can help you develop customer loyalty and improve relationships with your customers.

Sales bring in the money that enables your business to survive and grow. Your sales strategy will be driven by your sales objectives.

Market research exists to guide your business decisions by giving you insight into your market, competitors, products, marketing and your customers.

Exhibitions and events are valuable for businesses because they allow face-to-face communication and offer opportunities for networking.

Five tips and tricks for email marketing campaigns

Email marketing plays an important role in building a loyal audience and a reliable customer base. However, many companies are not doing email marketing correctly. Although it sounds easy enough, this marketing type involves so much more than simply writing a bunch of emails and sending them out.

It takes time and effort to put together the right type of content, to learn what your audience responds to the most, and to find the balance between offering value and being too salesy. With that said, here are five tips that will help you take your email marketing campaigns to the next level.

#1 Personalise everything

The number one rule of email marketing is to always personalise your emails. What does this mean? Simply put, personalising email content refers to using people's real names and information as if you are speaking directly to them. You will send out a single email marketing campaign to hundreds, if not thousands of people, depending on the size of your email list.

It is next to impossible to send separate and individual emails to every single person on the list. However, advanced email marketing tools such as MailChimp allow you to automate the personalisation of the content by setting up merge tags. Merge tags insert unique user data from your mailing list directly into the email. That way, each person on the list will receive an email with their name at the top (eg "Hi, Jack…").

#2 Rely on automation

Email marketing would be nearly impossible if it weren't for automation. This tool helps digital marketers to stay afloat when dealing with complex email campaigns and a list of other unrelated tasks. With automation, they can easily set everything up and have emails go out when they want them to.

Email automation allows you to organise your time more efficiently. You can dedicate one day of the week to creating email content and automate the sending procedure. That way, you won't have to deal with the setup every time you want to send out an email. Moreover, automated campaigns allow you to welcome each new subscriber with the initial email without manually sending one out each time someone is added to the list.

#3 Focus on segmentation

The key to email marketing success is knowing how to separate your audience and classify them. Depending on what type of strategies and lead magnets you're using to attract new subscribers, you're likely to have a bunch of contacts that don't necessarily have the same needs and interests.

That's why it is important to create separate segments and put together different emails for each group on the list. This will allow you to hit targets more closely and achieve better results with each new email campaign.

#4 Provide value

The biggest mistake email marketers make is being too salesy in their content. Not every email you send out should be focused on getting people to do what you want them to do. Instead, you have to provide value in some way.

By providing value through storytelling and other strategies, you will keep people interested and motivated to remain subscribed to your list. Being too salesy will push people away and get them to unsubscribe before receiving your next email.

#5 Never stop testing

Lastly, email marketing is all about testing. The more experience you collect around crafting emails and segmenting your audience, the better your results will be. However, to get to that sweet spot of knowing what your audience wants, you need to do a lot of testing.

This includes experimenting with different subject line lengths and themes, visual content, links, calls to action, and more. The more you test, the better your future emails are going to be since you will be able to implement what you learn.

Making more effort increases conversion rates

Putting more time into email marketing will significantly boost the results of your digital marketing efforts. One thing you should keep in mind is that as a marketer, you are going to be exposed to a variety of online security threats.

The best way to avoid potential security risks is to use a UK VPN to virtually change your location and access the internet completely anonymously. That way, your data and devices will be protected by the VPN as you're surfing the web and getting work done.

Copyright 2023. Article brought to you in cooperation with the PR Consultancy

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