razz

All articles by: razz

Website: https://raspberryitservices.com

Email Marketing
October 3, 2022  

What you need to know about email marketing in 2022

In case you’re wondering, email marketing is still a valuable tool for marketing in 2022. Even in the dawn of newer and seemingly better marketing tools like mobile marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, etc. Don’t start ignoring your email database just because there are new methods on the market.

One of the biggest factors that shaped today’s marketing climate is definitely the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether consciously or subconsciously, having a sudden sense of unpredictability made a lot of people reevaluate their priorities and which brands they will place their trust into or support going forward.

Upon observation, consumers now place great importance in a brand’s personality and the way it interacts with the community. They place great importance in finding out what the community feels about a brand rather than names and looks. They are also drawn towards a marketing approach that feels more personalized.

Whether you feel that personalized ads are good or bad—One thing is for sure is that it truly works. There is so much content to be consumed online, that it makes sense for people to gravitate towards content that is truly aimed for them to save time.

So, if you’re needing some fresh new insight about how email marketing works in 2022, here is your quick refresher, courtesy of your team from Raspberry IT Services. Giving you structured ideas for content or cool new email marketing tools that you and your market will enjoy, to help inspire a stronger brand presence and potentially deliver a better market performance.

Micro-segmented and Personalized Email Marketing Content

Since we’re just coming from the topic of personalization, here’s something that will be super useful. You can also make personalized content for email marketing.

This is accomplished by deep diving into your database’ and categorizing clients further down to their specific preferences about your product that they mentioned in passing or through actual inquiries and arranging them into their respective email lists.

You can accomplish it by simply profiling your clientele based on recommendations. i.e. if Client 1 availed the products X, Y, and Z, they are part of Category A or your email list. Going by this information, you may put Client 2 who purchased product X recently in the same Category A data hoping maybe product y or z would interest Client 2.

You can arrange email lists based on one product, or customer profiles like a birth month, ages, Gender, or location, depends on what kind/s of information you have available to you.

From here, you can make sure to send promotions catered to which clients are celebrating their birthdays this month, which products are appropriate for which age groups, or gauge which clients would like to hear about a promotion or availability of a specific product based on their previous purchase.

You can also get some more insight on your market’s interest by giving surveys to have a better gauge how to create your email lists. It also serves as an interactive part of your email campaigns so that your clients remember doing something fun and engaging with your content.

Micro-segmented, personalized email content for specific email lists is a little harder to upkeep and maintain as it needs to be regularly updated. However, if done right, it is a sure key to increasing your open rate by over 200%.

User Generated Email Marketing Content

If you’ve been in the internet often enough, chances are, you are familiar with user-generated content in one way or another. This pertains to brand content that highlights their community. Things like posting photos with the product or service, or taking videos using the product, and giving reviews about the product or service.

How do you incorporate User Generated Content on your email marketing?

Simple, build organic online relationships with your users/ community. Communicate and ask them for feedback about your product or services, testimonials can be used as content for your emails, along with photos.

While this content is not directly selling, it builds foundation for your clients to build trust in what your brand can offer. It gives them something to remember you by, and potentially have you first on their mind once they’re ready to avail what you have to offer.

Artificial Intelligence enters the Email Marketing Game

One sure proof that email marketing is not dying down anytime soon is backed up by the fact that AIs are now entering the scene to assist businesses in creating effective email content.

There is so much helpful data out there that AIs are able to pick up and analyze to come up with more effective email marketing content. Things like which product pages a certain client profile visits or which products are added to the card most frequently.

We can definitely predict a rising trend with the use of AIs in email marketing, helpful with arranging things like predicting the content that will work with your email lists, refining on survey results to update email lists, choosing the best time and day to send out your emails, picking effective subject lines for higher open rates, cleaning up, maintaining, or updating your email lists.

Basically, if you’re able to seek the assistance of an AI to refine your email marketing campaigns, it will 100% improve your overall efficiency and make sure that you’re at the top of your game with your email marketing.

 

Mobile-friendly Email Marketing

In case you’re still doubtful that email marketing works, try to imagine it in the following scenario. If you’re thinking “I don’t even check my emails, I would never see what these companies are selling me”, you’re closing yourself off from a real potential market.

More than a PC setup, most people in the world today would highly likely be on their phones at every hour of every day. Browsing their socials, playing games, watching their shows, grocery shopping, ordering food, banking transactions, even conducting their business.

While on their phone, they could be seeing a push notification of your email campaign with your carefully-selected eye-catching subject lines and they may feel inclined to check it out. There is nothing to lose in taking the time to make sure that someone sees your brand name for even a second of a day, reminding them of your presence in the market.

However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You will also have to step it up with an email marketing design that is equipped to look amazing in both desktop and mobile. That right there explains the importance of device optimization for your future email campaigns.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing

Congratulations, your subject line was effective and your email was opened by a curious client. However, if the content of your email does not load correctly on their device or it looks clunky and messed up, the engagement could be gone just as fast.

Design Trends of Email Marketing

Speaking on the matter of device responsiveness for email marketing, we also have to shed some light on the importance of what design approach to take going forward. One of which is decluttered, ‘short and sweet’ email marketing. Make your emails straight to the point that the first look upon opening gives your client a good idea of what to expect.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing

But this shouldn’t be confused with straight-up selling for the opener of your emails. One workaround is definitely to go at with a touch of personalization so that you’re getting to the point since the email is specifically targeted for the recipient. Your clients will invest more attention into something that they know is catered to their needs.

You will also have to make sure that you’re picking out easy-to-read fonts, colors, and photos that are eye-catching but not heavy on the eyes. Make sure that your texts are not too heavy, easy-to-understand or are understood even when the viewer is only sifting through without reading.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing

Choose complementary, engaging colors that are not too heavy on the eyes. Some email marketing campaigns would even go a step further and design campaigns that can be viewed in dark mode as it is less strenuous on the eyes.

Lastly, another way to achieve a sense of interactive and engaging content is to incorporate some animated photos / GIFs, some simple HTML animations on image when a client hovers their mouse on the image is also good practice. If you can make content that encourages an element of competition or promises a reward for participation, it would definitely get some traction.

Will you be practising these email marketing techniques?

In conclusion, email marketing will not be an obsolete business marketing tool in the next foreseeable future. There is still room to improve on current practices and seeing how new technologies will continue to be used to improve on the efficacy of email marketing, the best thing to do is to continue growing with the trends and shaping your business up to keep up with the market trends.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing

Are you actively marketing your business to your clients via email marketing? Does any of the points mentioned in this article sound like your next business practice? Would you like to know more of how you can use email marketing to reach your clients? Our team would be happy to know what you think.

May 25, 2022  

Customer Relationship Management: The Ultimate Tool for Online Businesses?

Do you use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System for your business? Are you properly keeping a database of your current customer profile? Have you ever considered the benefits of knowing who your customers are? A lot of traditional businesses have operated for years without the existence of tools like this. However, this makes determining who your customers are, heavily opinion-based. But, first of all, Is your business still very traditional? If you’re not sure how to answer this, let us help you evaluate with a couple of questions.

  1. Are your sales still highly dependent on walk-ins and word-of-mouth referrals?
  2. Do you have a website or an online profile? If yes, are you currently unsure how much it actually helps your sales?

If your answers are generally “yes” to the above questions, chances are, your business is still quite traditional. However, that is not to say it’s bad, it takes a lot for traditional or offline businesses to thrive in today’s economic climate and its changing market audience and profile. Furthermore, it speaks a lot about the image of your business in its local; it wouldn’t be far off to say that you have successfully established yourself as a reliable business to be able to rely on offline means of business for many years. (Though it wouldn’t hurt to continue growing) So why do we think that a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System is the “ultimate tool” for online businesses?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems

First of all, let’s break down what a CRM does. As it’s called, the primary function of a CRM is to help businesses maintain relationships with their customers. To be clear, the system is not going to do the work for you, but it’s going to help you gather enough insight into your own business that you could be missing otherwise. This is through the Analysis and Interpretation of Data. Your business’ CRM is ideally connected to your online platforms like your website, your social media pages, and many other forms of online broadcasting. However, it should also keep track of your offline sources like profiles of your walk-in customers. This is so that your CRM can properly present you with all the information you need to know through carefully collected data.

The Analysis

Your CRM collects and analyses the following factors for you:

  • Where are most of your current sales coming from? (The Marketing Campaign / Source)
  • What is their demographic? (The Customer Profile)
  • Which products are making the most sales? (The Product)
  • Which employees are making the most sales? (The Sales Performance)
  • How many of your already existing clients come back and which marketing method is responsible for this? (The Retargetting Source and Marketing Performance)

The Interpretation

Using the above information, you can interpret various facets of your business:

  • The Marketing Campaign/Source:
    • If you observe that “A” is your largest source of sales, you will be able to continue focusing on this.
    • If you observe that “B” is giving you new customers but they’re not becoming a sale, you can decide accordingly on a resolve (1) How to make more sales in the future by looking back at the product or the sales/marketing performance. (2) Decide to regroup and pause campaigns on this in the meantime to formulate a better approach.
  • The Customer Profile:
    • If you observe that “A” demographic is your current main source of sales, you can make sure to keep future marketing campaigns appropriate.
    • If you observe that the “B” demographic has the potential to become a sustainable source of business, you can form future marketing campaigns accordingly.
  • The Product:
    • If you observe that “A” product is performing well, this could be interpreted as a good product in the market that is forming a steady demand, you can highlight it.
    • If you observe that the “B” product isn’t performing as well, you can look back as to why that is so and make decisions accordingly.
  • The Sales Performance:
    • If you observe that “A” employee is capable of converting a lot of inquiries into sales, you can recognize this accordingly and observe what factors enabled this.
    • If you observe that “B” employee is not making as many sales, this lets you look into which factors are responsible and how to improve on it.
  • The Retargetting Source and Marketing Performance:
    • Keeping a customer database of existing and recurring customers (patrons) makes it easy to communicate with them and keeps them in the loop for future sales opportunities.

The Information Overload

When you look at all this on a piece of an article online, it can look almost overwhelming, right? But that’s exactly why you need to get your hands on the system and see it work in its full glory. It’s easy to explain in theory how a business tool will help to make decisions easily. But it’s different when it’s sitting right in your hands and is telling you what exactly you should know about your own business. Having a Customer Relationship Management System can help you determine what your goals are, or where your business is supposed to be. Most of all, it will help you see if you’re still growing as a business, and which areas of your business you need to focus on to do so. Your CRM will do so through a series of forecasting data, detailing your expected sales performance based on previous data, and giving you an insight into realistic corporate goals based on facts. Though a CRM will not directly do your business for you, it eliminates the tedious process of data collection and presents you with an organized overview of your business. So you can spend less time making trials and errors, and spend more time making smart decisions.

Make Customer Relationship Management Simple.

With Raspberry IT Services’ comprehensive CRM system, setting up your new business best friend is easy peasy. Speak to our expert sales analysts to find out if this is the tool that you need and how you can get started. Focus Keyphrase: Customer Relationship Management Slug: customer-relationship-management-online-business Meta Description: Do you use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System for your business? Are you properly keeping a database of your current customer profile?

May 25, 2022  

Business Website: 3 Myths You Need to Debunk Now for Online Success Boost

In this article, we will discuss the 3 biggest reasons why businesses (big or small) are not making a business website. Then we will debunk these misunderstandings. Finally, amplifying the reason why the best time to start a website is TODAY.

What’s stopping you from creating a business website?

Research says that there are 3 primary reasons why business owners opt out of creating a business website.

1. It’s difficult

Firstly, creating a website began as something only reputable establishments did. Of course, this was the case at the beginning of the internet. For instance, saying only big companies with global reach should have a website. Because they have the capacity to hire teams of developers to make it. However, this is not true. There is an influx of establishments willing to offer website design services. Additionally, there are multiple platforms offering to make this process an easy DIY. Designing a business website has never been easier, almost anyone could do it– even you can! Still, this doesn’t mean you can commission just anyone. Investing in a website can hurt you if the person responsible for it will not commit enough. They have to make sure your website design is the best fit for your needs. By this, it means trusting your website in good hands. Towards people who will spend a laborious amount of time configuring the following:

  • SEO optimization – Make sure that you are using the right photos and content. Ensure that your business will be at the top should someone search your service on Google
  • Responsive design – Making sure that your website looks cohesive on all devices
  • File compression – Make sure that all your files are the right size and wouldn’t disrupt your website performance.
  • Schema markup – Advanced tool derived from SEO Optimization. This allows websites to be featured at the top of the page organically. This is through having informative content on their website.

Above are just four of the initial overwhelming– but not completely difficult tasks that come with website design.

2. It’s expensive

Besides thinking it’s difficult, most business owners think that having a website comes with a price. This was relatively true in the past. However, there is a great demand for being online as a business. With that, came a large number of companies offering these exact services. Consequently coming up with more ways to make the expenses more accessible to the market. Here’s what we can tell you, as long as you know the right sources that will cover the basics. This includes hosting, domain name, and design that you need, you have nothing to worry about. The only reason websites become more expensive is dependent on how many plugins and extensions you have. On top of how much customization you want to put into your website. For example, wanting advanced motion graphics elements or branding designs.

3. My company doesn’t need a “business website”

Most businesses seem to think they already get plenty of business offline. Also saying that they are already having so much work and a website will make it worse. There is also speculation that websites are only for certain industries. However, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. On getting plenty of offline business and fear that attracting more business from online networks. The majority of people look up a website to know answers to very simple questions. These are questions which they would otherwise call your establishment to ask. i.e. Operating Hours, Location, Directions, Product Questions for Pick Up, Reservation Queries. Having a website where you are already clearly showcasing this information is good. This will eliminate phone calls having to tend to by your employees. Instead, they can focus on attending to current matters of service at hand. In saying that a business website is only for certain industries, you eliminate innovating. The idea is that you can always revolutionize a known tool to your advantage. If business-to-business, manufacturing or corporate companies thought that only e-commerce businesses should have a website. They are risking the prospect of having bigger clients or potentially branching off to a more global scale of operations. Similarly, if a smaller e-commerce or food industry business thought the same. That only big-scale operations needed a website i.e. large food service chains. They are failing to realize that at the current time, 55% of businesses have taken to having a website. And they are progressively becoming left behind in having an established online presence.

In conclusion…

There is no business out there exempt from needing a business website. Every single one needs to take advantage of this new tool to improve and branch out. It has become less difficult and less expensive for everyone. This has opened the grounds for small-scale businesses to be on the same playing field as the goliaths. And the sooner you start, the more you will reap its rewards in the future.