Email Marketing: How the Old Trick Is Helping Local Businesses

Email marketing isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when talking about marketing for local businesses. It may not be the first thing you remember when talking about digital marketing, especially now with other instruments such as social media becoming more popular than ever. Still, more and more businesses catering to customers in Gloucester and nearby areas are turning to email marketing as a way to expand their consumer base.

There is a good reason for that. Email marketing, in many ways, is similar to direct mail. It is a marketing tool that many local businesses are already familiar with. More importantly, it is a marketing tool that produces results and helps local businesses attract more walk-in traffic as well as to win new customers.

The Old Trick

Email marketing isn’t a new trick in the book of digital marketing. In fact, it is one of the oldest. The first mass email campaign was actually initiated in 1978, which means email marketing is celebrating its 40th birthday in 2018.

From the first campaign, however, the effectiveness of email marketing was apparent. That first mass email campaign was the idea of Gary Thuerk, now known as the father of spam.

"We sold $13 million or $14 million worth of the DEC machines through that e-mail campaign”, Thuerk stated. The campaign was such a big success that Thuerk did not pay attention to the stream of complaints about receiving unwanted emails that came afterwards.

Today, email marketing can still produce the same results and a high return on investment, or ROI. You just need the right recipients, good email marketing content, and a capable bulk email software to handle the delivery and other more complex tasks for you.

More Than Bulk Email

Speaking about bulk email software, today’s solutions for sending mass emails to recipients are so much more capable. Email marketing is no longer about sending a massive amount of emails to recipients. It is more about getting to know those recipients, sending contextual content to them, and everything else in between.

The tools sit at the heart of just how capable email marketing is today. SendinBlue, a leading bulk email software platform that has become the favorite of many top brands, even go as far as offering tools to automate most, if not all, of the maintenance tasks associated with running a successful email marketing campaign.

There are plenty of insights to gain from the large stream of data that email marketing now produces. At the same time, there are more ways to benefit from the insights you gain, especially when optimizing the email marketing campaign itself. It is a cycle that leads to a very effective digital marketing campaign nonetheless.

The Local Wisdom

What experts aren’t predicting is how email marketing is being used by local businesses to engage the customers better. There have been some creative campaigns involving email marketing these past few months, and there will be more interesting ones to follow in the future.

Rather than asking customers to visit the business’s website to sign up for a newsletter, for instance, local businesses are using anything from QR codes to offline loyalty programs as a way to get customers to opt-in. This makes opting in for newsletters easier from the customer’s perspective, eliminating the entry barrier altogether.

Local businesses are also rewarding customers who sign up for their newsletters, often on the spot to further generate interest. When customers subscribe to the business’s newsletters, they get a confirmation email that includes a coupon they can use right away.

It is even more interesting to see how local businesses can use insights and leverage content that is specific to their target audience. The hottest new developments in Gloucester or upcoming events that the businesses support is among the regular content seen in newsletters of local businesses.

Building Relationships

There is one other interesting point about the use of email marketing as a way to market local businesses, and that is how much more personalized email marketing is today compared to the direct mail campaigns of the past. Thanks to automation and more features being offered by bulk email software, there are more things businesses can do to build genuine relationships.

Email marketing becomes so effective that customers started talking about the content of the latest newsletter when visiting the retail establishments. In return, local businesses get to engage the customers in a more personal and genuine way when they do come to the stores. Even experienced marketing experts are surprised by this development.

One thing is for sure, and that is that email marketing works for local businesses and it produces a high ROI. It is also a relatively cheap digital marketing instrument to use and one that is easy to master. Expect to see more local businesses utilizing newsletters as a way to connect with existing customers and attracting new ones.