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As discussed in one of my previous blogs, there are many potential benefits to utilising an email campaign as a digital marketing tactic for your business: ability to measure its success, targeting and time saving to name a few. When considering any new marketing venture, it is important to think about the benefits, costs and negatives before investing time and money. But what are the potential drawbacks when it comes to email marketing?
1. Client relationships
A well written, useful email has the potential to strengthen an existing relationship with customers, or to initiate a call to action for new customers, but a carelessly written email could damage these relationships with your clients. Some people will be less than appreciative of having their inbox filled with countless emails from different businesses, and may become tired of receiving emails that could be considered spam. Some useful tips for creating and maintaining client relationships through email marketing can be found here.
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2. Reliability
Because of the number of emails that many people receive on a day to day basis, many customers will simply delete your email as unimportant before even taking the time to read it, meaning that future emails will end up in the ‘junk’ inbox. Furthermore, using a bulk emailing programme increases the risk of your email being filtered into the ‘junk’ inbox of recipients before ever reaching their main inbox, meaning it will be very unlikely that the email will be seen. Here are some great tips for avoiding the ‘junk’ inbox. The reliability of this method of marketing can also vary because even if people do open your email, there is no guarantee that they will read on or click-through meaning that response rates can vary.
3. Preferences
Individual customers will have preferences for different kinds of content, offers and frequency which will effect their likeliness to engage with and respond to your email. This could mean that there is a lot of market research and trial and error required to perfect the kind of content that your customers will be interested in. Even after perfecting your content based on research, it is impossible to cater for every recipients likes and dislikes meaning that there will always be a struggle with customers un-subscribing.
4. Renderability
With all of the different platforms and devices available through which customers can access their emails, it is a challenge for businesses to ensure that their marketing emails will look good wherever they are opened. This will, therefore, require a significantly higher time investment into testing how the emails will look on each platform to ensure that recipients are able to open and read your content, and access images. If people are unable to read your email, and if it doesn’t look good, on their chosen platform then you are unlikely to get the desired response for your business. Check out some statistics below showing the variety of devices used to open emails:
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Overall, email marketing is fast becoming an old tactic, becoming replaced by newer methods such as social media meaning that the effectiveness of this channel is not the same as it once was. Social media provides a less invasive channel to engage with customers and provide them with information (Chaffey, 2012). It is therefore important to consider your target market and resources, as well as consider the positives and negatives of each method, in order to better decide which marketing methods are best for your business. This is not to say, however, that email marketing is ineffective if executed correctly: and can still prove to be a strong marketing tactic for your company.
Check out these sources for more information:
Advantages & Disadvantage of Using Email Campaign
Pros & Cons of Email Marketing
5 Drawbacks of Email Marketing
Advantages & Disadvantages of Email Marketing
References:
Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012) ‘Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practise’. [Online] < http://lib.myilibrary.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/Open.aspx?id=399626 > [Accessed 30/4/16]
You’ve been keeping a blog for your small business, and you feel like your content is interesting and engaging, but how can you measure how effective this time investment is for your business? Keeping track of key metrics using the right methods is a great way to identify ways to improve the reach and performance of your blog, and ensure you are getting a good return on investment for your blogging efforts.
To start with, it’s a good idea to identify what your aim is: what do you want to achieve through your blog posts? Some examples of this could be:
- Drive more traffic to your website through search engine optimisation
- Raise the profile of your business
- Engage with your current customer base
- Gain new customers through interest and trust
- Learn more about what your customers want
- Share and gain expertise in your area
Depending on what your aim is, there are a variety of ways to keep track of how effective your blog is at achieving this.
Google Analytics
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Google Analytics is a great, free tool to keep an eye on the natural growth of your blog. Monitor the number of visits to your blog and the average visits for each individual post to see if any content got a particularly high number of visits, this way you can learn what kind of content your readers are interested in and focus more on sharing this. Through Google Analytics, you can also monitor the sources of this traffic: which social media sites are most effective at promoting your content? This will enable you to focus on promoting your blog through these sites, and stop wasting time on those that don’t bring you any traffic. Keywords are another area to keep an eye on, by monitoring what people are searching for to find your blog you can utilise these words within new posts in order to gain more views. You can also monitor the click-throughs for your call to action: a link to your business’s products or services, and how many of the blog readers are following up on this, which is a real measure of the success of the blog for your business rather than for its content.
Bounce Rate
This is an important metric to keep track of, and is usually much higher for blogs than other kinds of web pages. It is usually measured in one of two ways:
- User visits for 10 seconds or less
- User visits one page and then leaves
If a user discovers your blog post through a search engine, they will read the page that they are directed to and usually once they have found the information they are searching for, will exit. When users are visiting the site of a business, they will generally be looking for that business specifically and are therefore more likely to spend time looking around the site. It is suggested by this source that a bounce rate of below 65% should be aimed for, however this is easier said than done as you can’t directly control what people want to read! Visitors that find your blog through social media are likely to remain on the site for longer, as they are usually more engaged with your business: although this is intangible and difficult to define. Reducing your bounce rate is clearly beneficial as it means that visitors are more interested in your content, so perhaps if your rate is very high you should consider thinking about what you are posting.
Conversations
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One of the biggest measures of the success of a blog, and the biggest benefits to a business running one, are the real conversations that are happening with their customers (Briffet & Ruebke, 2013). A key measure of this is the number of subscribers, comments and shares that your blog posts are having, and ensuring that your business is responding to those comments and providing real value to your customers: both current and future.
Overall, there are many metrics you can monitor to check your blog is achieving what you want it to achieve, and these should be utilised in order to improve your content and to increase the number of leads you are getting through the blog post. It is important to consider your metrics against the time, effort and funding put into the blog, and ensure that you are getting a good return on investment (Davis & Crawford, 2011).
Read more here:
How to measure the success of your business blog
Social media measurement tools
How effective is your blog?
Blogging success
References:
Davis, T. and Crawford, I. (2011) Business Accounting and Finance. 1st ed. Financial Times/Prentice Hall.
Briffett, S. & Ruebke, S. (2013) ‘The role of content in creating meaningful conversations online: Case study of Henkel Beauty Care’s digital campaign in Germany’. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, Volume 1, Number 2, 1 January 2013, pp. 128-135(8)
According to this source 144.8 billion emails are sent globally every single day. So it is important to ensure that yours is one of the few that ends up being noticed, and doesn’t end up straight in the trash. But what are the most effective ways to ensure your marketing email is noticed, opened and actioned?
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1. Personalisation
It is important to make an email relevant and personalised to the reader, but without coming across as false. This source suggests that using a customer’s name at the start of an email is actually off-putting, forcing familiarity too soon will not create a relationship where one does not already exist. Briffett (2013) reminds us to keep relationships with the consumer meaningful. Much like in real life, intimacy must be earned rather than assumed. Instead, opt for personalisation based on previous customer activity such as their needs or history, demonstrating much more care and effort and acknowledging a subscribers individuality.
2. Subject line
The subject line of an email is going to be the deciding factor on whether someone decides to open or not, so it needs to be eye-catching and relevant. When it comes to the length, there appears to be one area to avoid: between 60 and 70 characters, or what is referred to by marketers as the ‘dead zone’ of subject length. Research by Adestra found that there is no increase in click throughs or open rate for subject titles of this length, through tracking over 900 million emails in their report. It was found that subject lines of above 70 characters were most beneficial to engage readers in clicking through to content within the email, and subject lines of less than 50 tested well with open rate. A great example of an effective subject line was Barrack Obama’s fundraising campaign, with just ‘Hey’ as the subject he saw fantastic engagement with the campaign.
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3. Timing
Research (see below) has shown that the optimum time to send out a Marketing email is between 8am and midday, in order to get not only the best open rate but click throughs and sales too. Importantly, each customer base will be different so the best way to find the right timing for success is to test! Send out emails at different times and see what is most effective for your business, and be sure to monitor stats through your email client.
4. Build your subscriber list!
If you are sending emails out to the same small pool of recipients it makes sense that you would get a limited response rate. Look for opportunities to increase opt-ins and collect contact details for your customers and those who are interested in your business.
- Strategically place a newsletter signup form on relevant pages of your website
- Link to an email newsletter opt-in within a one-off email
- Add a newsletter opt-in field to inquiry or booking forms
- Add an opt-in link to order confirmations, surveys and other emails that you send out
It is also a good idea to include links to social media within your email to allow recipients to share with others, enabling you to gain even more subscribers.
It is important to remember that email marketing is still a paid media (Chaffey, 2012) much like traditional leaflets, and as a business you would not continue to invest in handing out leaflets if there was no sign of return on this investment. Although email marketing can take some time to figure out, and it can take some practise to make the most of this channel, that does not mean that it will work for everyone. However if you are willing to put in a bit of work and investment, as with any marketing, it can pay off as a cost effective and successful way to advertise your business.
Check out some great examples and more tips:
Email marketing examples
8 effective email strategies backed by research
Effective email marketing in 10 simple steps
14 tips for effective email marketing
References:
Briffett, S. & Ruebke, S. (2013) ‘The role of content in creating meaningful conversations online: Case study of Henkel Beauty Care’s digital campaign in Germany’. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, Volume 1, Number 2, 1 January 2013, pp. 128-135(8)
Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012) ‘Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practise’. [Online] < http://lib.myilibrary.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/Open.aspx?id=399626 > [Accessed 20/4/16]
With such a huge number of blogs for every topic imaginable available on the internet, estimated at over 275 million by this source, it is important to ensure that your business can make its blog visible to its target audience. Although it would be great for a business for readers to be able to randomly stumble upon your content, in reality it takes some work to build up an audience but the results can be worthwhile for making a good impression on customers! But what is the best way to drive readers to a blog?
- Content
If your content isn’t interesting and relevant to your target audience, why would they want to read your blog in the first place? Ensure you follow a clear theme, decide on a target audience and ensure you are conveying messages that they will want to read. According to this source, studies have shown that including visual content in your blog can increase people’s willingness to read by up to 80%, so it’s important to consider including not just photos but infographics, videos and recognisable visual links to social media platforms – enabling and encouraging readers to share your content with others. According to Briffett & Ruebke (2013) modern marketers need to give consumers multiple platforms through which they can engage in meaningful conversations with a business in order to succeed.
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- Promote
For many businesses there is a mentality of sharing a post once and then forgetting about it, but this should not be the case. Many people will miss the first communication but would pick up on subsequent shares at differing times and dates, meaning you can draw more of an audience by alerting them, or even nudge someone who may have seen something the first time to read it later. Be careful not to spam potential readers though, or you risk being unfollowed on social media platforms, instead try tweaking your post by sharing the title, a question, a fact or even a quote from the author (Some great examples here). As Taylor (2013) states, a social media strategy will determine which platforms are most suitable and will allow your business to share the same content across relevant channels ensuring synergy and accurate brand representation.
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- Title
Make sure you give each blog post a catchy and descriptive title, relevant to the content as not only is this the first thing that a potential reader will see – and what will help them to decide whether to read on or not – but it is also one of the factors used by search engines to determine what your blog is about. Keep it short, and stay on topic! There are some great tips on writing a good title here.
- Keywords
Keywords are the key to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and driving more traffic to your posts. Choose words in the title that you believe readers may search for to find your post and ensure you use these within the post at least twice, helping search engines to understand what your page is about and ultimately driving more people to your blog. Make sure to add links to other valuable sources, what search engines want to do is prioritize good quality information. As you can see in the graph below, SEO provides a huge opportunity to gather additional page views and increase reach and is only growing:
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As you can see it really pays to put some effort into improving the reach of your blog. It is important to remember to monitor your blog statistics through a free service like Google Analytics, to work out which methods are effective at getting your content out there and ensure that your hard work is successful. According to Ryan (2014) it is still important to remember that direct response, such as number of clicks, is not the only measure of success and to stay responsive with other metrics such as shares and comments.
Here are some other sources about driving traffic to check out:
20 ways to drive more traffic to your blog
21 tactics to increase blog traffic
How to drive more traffic to your blog
References:
Briffett, S. & Ruebke, S. (2013) ‘The role of content in creating meaningful conversations online: Case study of Henkel Beauty Care’s digital campaign in Germany’. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, Volume 1, Number 2, 1 January 2013, pp. 128-135(8)
Ryan, D. (2014) ‘Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation’. Page. 3rd Ed, pp. 76-77
Taylor, N. (2013) ‘Choosing between social media platforms and understanding the markets they reach’. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, Volume 1, Number 3, 1 December 2013, pp. 283-291(9)
According to this source, in July 2015 there were over 1.6 million Android apps and 1.5 million Apple apps available to download, with the largest percentage (22%) being games and those for food and drink, such as restaurants, coming in at 2.72%. It seems that these days every business has its own app, but do the benefits outweigh the costs when it comes to developing one for an independent restaurant?
What are the benefits to having an app?
Having your own mobile app would give a huge presence on a person’s phone, always sitting there rather than the customer needing to open a browser to access a website. This means that the business will always be in the mind of the phone user, leading to them opening the app (even by accident) which is unlikely to happen with a website alone, and can provide a much better user experience. Through an app, a business can provide better customer engagement: allowing a customer to book a table or view a menu in a few clicks rather than making a phone call (see chart below), improve customer loyalty: making a sincere connection with your customers and tracking their spending through rewards, and make themselves stand out from the competition: be the first to offer a mobile app. Another key point would be that an app can have extra content like a game, reward system or push notifications that a website simply cannot offer. Greenberg and Kates (2014) warn us that incorrect marketing in the area of apps can actually damage a brand rather than build it. With so many apps available to download, users are going to want to pick their favourites and will often delete those that they perceive to be useless, so it is important to ensure that the app will hold some value to the user before deciding to take the idea forward. What will make the user download your app? How will it benefit the user?
How much will it cost?
Since the app will be free to download, to encourage the widest possible reach, the costs will not be recuperated through downloads as with many games offering in-app purchases. To develop the app for all 3 major platforms, the costs will almost be tripled, with this source suggesting that it will cost around £15,000 to develop and deploy a brand-worthy app, not considering maintenance costs. Something else to consider would be how to make customers, and potential customers, aware of the apps existence, leading to further publicity costs. When it comes to return on investment, it is estimated that per $1 an app will reach 599 people when created for all 3 major platforms, but a mobile website will reach 2839.
Would a mobile friendly website be a better option?
Optimising an existing website for mobile is incredibly simple, and applications such as Weebly allow a business to create, manage and post content, and measure traffic simply starting at just £5 a month. Some website hosts, such as WordPress allow the website to be automatically converted to a mobile version when accessed from a mobile device, which would be even better value for money. Allowing mobile friendly access to a small business website will encourage customers to check back on it and will allow people browsing to spend more time clicking through pages to access more content, as this will be easy for them to do, meaning this would be a worthwhile small investment for an independent restaurant. Another key point, discussed in this article is that mobile websites will work on any device, whereas an app will be specific to individual platforms, further increasing development costs.
Overall, it seems that developing a mobile app can be incredibly expensive so it would be important to think about whether the app holds any real value to the customer. Greenberg and Kates (2014) tell us that customers are more likely to make a purchase if it is easy to do so on a mobile device – and this can relate to restaurants through allowing easy access to booking a table or viewing a menu. It seems that it may simply be too expensive with very little return to create and maintain an app for an independent restaurant, unless there are creative and useful ideas for content.
Interested? Have a look at the following posts for more information:
http://www.business2community.com/mobile-apps/10-great-mobile-app-development-tips-small-businesses-01362354#sc7mOMicAUjdu042.97
http://mashable.com/2011/02/24/mobile-app-dev-cost/#1ITOql5M1Pqq
http://www.forbes.com/sites/allbusiness/2014/11/17/heres-why-your-business-needs-its-own-mobile-app/#731e388c5c76
https://clutch.co/app-development/resources/mobile-apps-2015-small-business-survey
References:
Greenberg, E. and Kates, A. (2014) ‘Strategic digital marketing: top digital experts share the formula for tangible returns on your marketing investment’. [Online] < http://lib.myilibrary.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/Open.aspx?id=521998 > [Accessed 30/1/16]
In today’s marketing world where everything is becoming increasingly dominated by social media it can be easy to lose sight of one of the most valuable methods of creating and maintaining customer loyalty: email marketing.
So what are the benefits of using this method of marketing for an independent restaurant?
According to this source, small businesses are spending 15% of their marketing budgets on email marketing, meaning that it is still coming in over face to face and social media marketing expenditure. The reasons for this are likely some of the following:
- Time saving
Once the business has invested the initial effort into developing a nice template for email communications, or even found one online and adapted it, all that is involved is changing some wording and replacing graphics for each communication sent out. This means that the potential work of printing and handing out leaflets to potential customers in person, or investing in advertising to be put into magazines or newspapers (two other common methods of advertising for small restaurants), can be done by one employee in just a couple of hours, allowing more time to be invested into other marketing and business activities. This leads to the second reason…
- Frequency of communication
Because it doesn’t take long to compose a good email to customers, a restaurant would be able to send communications out more frequently enabling them to send out news and offers as often as they want – although this shouldn’t be taken as an excuse to bombard customers, nobody likes receiving tonnes of spam! This means that customers will always be up to date, and can be given new incentives and reasons to visit on a more frequent basis, something that is particularly important when it comes to encouraging people to come back to a restaurant. ‘Nudging’ customers in this way is often seen as one of the most effective ways of marketing – read more about this method here.
- Reduced cost
Email marketing can be done well at a very low cost to the business. Very few employees are needed to work on the email, there are no costs for phone lines, printing or postage and you don’t even need a designer. There a huge amount of services out there that will host email marketing and allow a small business to edit a host of pre-designed templates that can be altered and sent out as desired, available for very reasonable prices. There are few other marketing channels where a business can spend less and get such a large return!
- Measuring success
Using platforms and tracking software when sending out marketing emails will allow a great deal of tracking, from measuring the percentage of customers who open the email to measuring how many click links and even how many people go on to redeem an offer. These metrics are often very clear and easy to understand for someone with little marketing knowledge, and can allow the business to get a feel for what kinds of emails are most effective to improve in the future. Bananatag offer a free account that works with Gmail to track up to 5 emails a day, so you can get a feel for the kind of service offered before buying.
- Easy to target
It’s very simple to start collecting email addresses from current customers, or encouraging new customers to sign up in order to get special offers, and you can even allow people to ‘share’ the emails that’s sent out to others which will further widen the reach! This is referred to as ‘earned media’ according to Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick (2012) and refers to publicity generated by increased awareness of a brand. Emails can be personalised and sent out to people by name helping the restaurant to build relationships with consumers, and can help to collect more information to allow even more targeted emails to specific groups in the future.
Overall, there is very little to lose and lots to gain through having a strong and frequent email marketing strategy, and for a small business such as a restaurant, it is a key method of gaining feedback from customers by tracking the effectiveness of different kinds of communications. According to this source, in the UK businesses gained a return of £38 for every £1 spent on email marketing in 2014, so it is important to make sure that this is not an area being neglected! According to Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick (2012) however, it is important to ensure that digital marketing is still used with traditional marketing methods such as print media to form a strong, multi-channel communication plan.
To learn more, I would recommend reading the following posts about email marketing:
http://restaurantengine.com/restaurant-email-marketing/
http://www.musthavemenus.com/guide/restaurant-email-marketing/why-email-marketing.html
http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/email-marketing-ebook/email-marketing-benefits.aspx
http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-examples-list
http://www.shinealightmedia.com/small-business/10-benefits-of-using-email-marketing-for-small-businesses/
References:
Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012) ‘Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practise’. [Online] < http://lib.myilibrary.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/Open.aspx?id=399626 > [Accessed 30/1/16]
