Email marketing spend is on the increase, with companies eager to create great campaigns and not only pull in new customers but keep returning ones. Niche businesses shouldn’t hold back and think that email marketing will be ineffective for them, but how can they make it work?
Where to start
Creating a marketing strategy is one of the most important things you need to do. There is little point in just blindly ploughing into a marketing campaign, with no clue as to the direction you’re going or what you expect to gain out of it. You need to have a clear set of goals and time frames within which you want to reach those goals.
Don’t get too carried away and expect a complete transformation overnight because a good email marketing campaign takes time to flourish and the results are more likely to come in dribs and drabs, rather than as a sudden influx.
Find your own niche
While your business might be quite niche, you should also look to find the unusual angle in your marketing campaign. Sending a generic newsletter out to all of your customers every month is all well and good, but you may find that they get bored and that you struggle to bring in new customers. Make the unusual aspect of your business work for you and take full advantage of it; turn it into a marketing angle, rather than trying to play it down.
Niche campaigns are going to stand out and make people pay attention far more than the generic ones that consistently play it safe. When you try to have a ‘please everyone’ strategy, you are inevitably going to have a lot of mildly disappointed people. Wouldn’t you rather make 50 people really happy who might spread the word to their friends, than make 100 people feel indifferent? Dare to be different because that is what will make you stand out from the competition and get people talking about you.
Integrate social media
Adding social media to your email marketing can not only help to engage users but also provide an additional metric to your marketing. You can increase followers, encourage sharing and make it easy for users to become brand advocates. If you have created an excellent piece of content, use social media as part of the promotion strategy. Social media should be present on all of your digital marketing channels and email marketing is no exception. You can also reverse engineer social media to use it as a platform for increasing your database sign-ups and encouraging potential visitors to talk about your product or service.
Get personal
If you want to really get your customers buying into your business, you’re going to have to get personal with them. Glean as much information about their individual views and personality as you can, then tailor your emails accordingly. You might want to group your subscribers together according to certain interests or even by their essential information. This will allow you to send each group information that has been specifically tailored to their preferences. Making your customers feel valued is going to keep you in the good books and may even result in you increasing your customer base.
Halfway there
If you do have a particularly niche business, it can be easy to think that nobody will be interested in receiving any emails. However, you need to remember that if you have a business that is doing well and gaining customers, you are already halfway there. The current customers have already bought into your business so there is clearly a market; you just need to expand on that and exploit it.
One of the key things to remember in your campaign is to include a call to action. Many smaller businesses need to pull in more customers, so make it as clear as possible to your existing ones; if you want them to buy something, give them the perfect opportunity to do so. The age-old rule applies here: if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
Take it mainstream
There are some niche markets that actually go on to become mainstream and marketing plays a big part in that. While your business may start off being something small with a very select group of customers, if you invest in your marketing strategy it could go to the next level. In the same way that bizarre fashion trends get worn by millions of people around the world, your business could go the same way. If you target the right people in the first place, they will do a lot of the work for you, encouraging other people to buy into your product and increasing your reach.
When you have a limited budget, you need to think smart and spend your money wisely. Do as much research as you can to really get to know your existing and potential customers, before tailoring a campaign that will have the right impact on them. You are likely to find that you’re better off sending emails less frequently but ones that are full of useful content to your subscribers. Don’t spam them with useless information because it will cost you more and won’t have the desired outcome. Ultimately, the more detailed your research and planning, the more effective your email marketing campaign is likely to be.