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Email marketing is the use of email to promote a company’s products and services or to connect with the customers.  When it’s done well, email marketing is an effective sales driver.   When it’s done wrong, email marketing can come across as spam that annoys customers.  The best marketing emails are optimized for mobile devices; respect the customers, and followers.

Email marketing is the use of email to promote products or services while developing relationships with potential customers or clients. It is essentially direct mail done electronically instead of through the postal service.

Anytime a company sends out an email, aside from order confirmations and direct responses to customer questions, it could be considered a form of email marketing. Email marketing is one segment of internet marketing which encompasses online marketing via websites, social media, blogs, and more.

Email marketing can include newsletters with updates on the company, or promotions of sales and exclusive deals for subscribers. Marketing emails may also seek to share a general message on the company’s behalf, such as in the wake of a natural disaster or company scandal.

At its best, email marketing allows businesses to keep their customers informed and tailor their marketing messages to their audience. At its worst, this kind of marketing can drive customers away with persistently annoying spam emails.

How Email Marketing Works

It’s easy to set up and track an email marketing campaign, which makes it accessible for small businesses. You can add a newsletter sign-up option to your website, for instance. As people sign up, you can send newsletters to a growing audience. You can also direct customers to the newsletter from your social media profiles.

Why Email Marketing is a No-Brainer for Small Businesses

You may be wondering why consumers prefer receiving updates from brands through email. Here are just a few reasons why we think email marketing works so well with the modern consumer:

It’s convenient: With access to email right on their smartphone, most consumers find this type of communication very convenient. Not only can consumers stay connected with their favorite brands wherever they are, but they can easily redeem any coupon codes or other special offers right from their phone.

It’s personal: With this, today’s consumer is bombarded with marketing messages, and they tend to respond best to marketing strategy, you can personalize your messages and content based on the subscribers preferences and buying patterns. Email segmentation makes it easy to deliver the most relevant offers and content to the consumer.

It’s instant: Consumers like the ability to get information about exclusive offers and last minute deals. Sending email campaigns allows your small business to instantly and directly get the word out about these sales and promotions so that your consumers can take advantage of the opportunity to save.  

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is the process of optimizing your website to get more organic traffic. SEO marketing directs changes that make it more attractive to a search engine.  SEO helps to optimize the website to gain unpaid or organic traffic on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

Why does SEO marketing matter?

Search engines want to provide the best results for users.

That means high-quality, informative listings that fit the user’s search query. By using SEO marketing, you can help your website’s pages appear in relevant and valuable search results. For example, when I type “best burgers in Dallas/Ft Worth, TX” into Google, the results contain the most relevant pages for that search.

If you want to earn one of these top spots, it’s crucial that you have a top-notch SEO campaign.

Including results for top burger in dallas\ft worth texas.

Do you want results only for best burgers in Dallas\FtWorth TX?

As a bonus, SEO helps you earn quality traffic too.

When people visit your site, you want them to be people interested in your products or services. SEO allows you to optimize your website to reach the people looking for your business.

There isn’t any point in driving traffic to your site if it isn’t quality traffic.

If you appeared in searches for Apple products when you sell fresh apples, for example, you wouldn’t drive relevant traffic to your site. By investing in SEO marketing, you’ll guide the right traffic to your website.

SEO marketing also helps you with traffic quantity.

If more people are visiting your site and learning about your business, it sends a positive signal to Google that your website is relevant to search results related to different pages on your site.

It will help rank your site higher, which means more people can find and visit your page.

3 parts of SEO marketing that influence your rankings

SEO marketing is an in-depth method that has numerous moving parts. This strategy can be complicated to understand because SEO involves many components.

The three parts of SEO marketing:

On-page SEO

On-page SEO involves any optimizations on your website.

This portion of SEO includes strategies to optimize individual pages on your website.  You implement changes on a page to help it rank better in search results.

Technical SEO

Aside from on-page SEO, there is also technical SEO.

Technical SEO involves the backend of your site and optimizing those components to help your site rank better.

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO involves any off-page SEO strategies outside of your company’s direct control. This practice helps strengthen your relationship with other sites and builds your online reputation in your industry.

The most common off-site SEO practice is back links.

Back links are links to your site from other sites. These links can improve a search engine’s perception of your website, especially if the back links come from reputable, high-authority websites.

You can attract back links to your site by creating high-quality content.

If other industry authorities see your quality content, they’re more likely to link to it from their website. In most cases, your business will have to conduct outreach to make these sites aware of your content and its value.

While outside your direct control, off-site SEO is a must for improving your site’s ranking.

SEO marketing is a great way to grow your business online. You’ll help your company drive more organic traffic to your site and earn more valuable leads.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! I know that’s generally a Christmas-time sentiment, but the November holiday season is just as fun and magical and inspiring. It’s still early in November, but Thanksgiving will be here before we know it, and Christmas won’t be too far behind it. The holiday season just goes by so fast every year.

As we head towards the end of a tumultuous year, business owners are met with a new challenge: planning for 2021. As we round out 2020 and look towards the New Year, it’s time to consider ways to grow your business, not just keep it above water. Growing your business during these challenging times is tough, but it is possible—and Beyond is here to help you every step of the way. Let’s get ready to dig in and grow your small business in 2021? Read on for three ways to get started.

Get Serious About Your Customers

Your customers are your key to success, that’s a no brainer. But in a time when connecting face to face is harder than ever, how can you keep your customers engaged and loyal? We’ve said it once and we’ll say it again and find new ones, online. Whether that be through your website, social media, email marketing, or another platform, staying top of mind and meeting your customers where they least expect is a simple and often free way to keep your clients engaged. In 2021, small business owners need to think about where they can skip costs, and how they can maximize profits.

Take Your Business Online with an Online Storefront

With the colder months ahead and the potential for more in-person closures, your business simply has to be online. But just because you’ve got your social media and website up, doesn’t mean you’re ready to really grow in 2021. If you don’t have an online storefront, you need one. We know that creating a website and accepting payments online can be costly and complicated, which is why we developed our own online storefront to help get you there faster, at an affordable price.

Prepare for Whatever Might Come

If 2020 has taught small business owners anything, it’s that no matter how well you budget, plan, and prepare, you can never really be sure what will come. As we look to 2021, small business owners should be prepared for business interruptions. 2021 might not be the year for costly renovations or opening new locations, but your business still might need a little help with cash flow. Just because you aren’t opening that second location, doesn’t mean your oven won’t break or other unforeseen difficulties won’t arise. 

How to Use Your IG Stories

The way you use your stories is highly dependent upon your industry. E-commerce stores will use their stories in a completely different way than a plumber or general contractor would.

1. E-Commerce/Retail: Some great ways to use your IG stories in this industry would be behind the scenes videos of your shipping process or scanning in new inventory in prep for a live sale (a quick peep of the new products to generate excitement for the upcoming live). You can also use your stories to share your outfit of the day (#OOTD) where you can link the story directly to the products in your store so followers can simply swipe up and shop directly from IG.
2. General Contractors: If you fall in this industry, use your stories to show your followers behind the scenes at a job! For some reason people love to see major disastrous jobs…if you’re a plumber and you respond to a huge leak, share a short video clip of it in your story. You can share a swipe up link for people needing your services. It keeps you in the forefront of your followers’ minds when they do need a plumber/general contractor.
3. Bakery/Chef/Restaurant: Use your story to share a food story! Right around mealtimes or snack times, tempt your followers with delicious looking fresh-made plates/dishes on the scene. Describe the smell, taste, etc. Consider it a short commercial just for that dish! Works like a charm!

Benefits of Using Stories

So whether you have been using stories for a while or you are just learning about them, it’s important to understand there are many benefits employing stories. What do you have to lose?

There are approximately 1 billion users on IG each month and over 500 million of them use stories. Think of the potential you have to reach people with stories. 200 million IG users visit at least one business profile a day and 1/3 of the most viewed stories are business stories. These numbers should be enough to push you over the edge if you’re sitting on the fence! This is a free platform and the viewers are literally there for the taking!

Your stories are also unique to your business. You get to create them. You aren’t restricted to the newsfeed guidelines. The best benefit of all; however, is that you can repurpose your high-performing content. If you used something on your home page that performed really well, you can utilize it in your stories periodically because it only lasts 24 hours. New viewers won’t know its old content! This saves you a lot of time and effort.  

Let’s Wrap Things Up!

In summary, you really can’t go wrong with Instagram stories. You can also, share them to your Facebook stories at the same time assuming you have your Instagram business page connected to your Facebook business page! Who doesn’t love a 2 for 1?

If this still seems a bit overwhelming, or social media just isn’t your forte, reach out to our experts here at Mind Yo Business, Inc. and we can get you squared away with a professional social media manager and content creator. Contact Us Today!