Maybe your marketing plans are off to a great start this year. Or maybe you're bogged down with too many other small business issues to focus on marketing. But the reality is that most of your sales revenue this year is going to be generated by your existing and returning customers and those referrals they send your way! How many of those returning customers and referrals you receive is going to depend on your email marketing efforts and staying top-of-mind. 

By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President

Small business owners and savvy marketers know that in order for your promotions and sales efforts to be most effective, you should know as much as possible about your potential customer; what their habits are both online and off, their income, commute habits, communication preferences, etc. 

This all helps paint a picture of their needs, and helps you determine at what point your products or services could be of use to them. This type of personalized data on your customer is incredibly valuable, and one of the reasons why big data is such a rapidly growing market. ​

Yet for most small businesses, finding the right customer at the right time using snippets of demographic and other consumer behavior data can be time consuming and hit-or-miss. Even the best, most thoroughly researched marketing campaigns only convert a small percentage of their target audience. 

​By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President

According to Marketing Sherpa, 61 percent of email subscribers would like to receive promotional emails every week, and 38 percent would like to receive them more frequently. 

Although we question if those statistics should be applied to every industry, we do think that small business marketers should be communicating with their customers and subscribers at least once per month. By emailing your communities once a month you'll stay top-of-mind, be able to communicate special offers and sales, and better nurture your customer relationships. 

Here are some ideas from Constant Contact on how to spread the love all month long:

​By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President​

We're finding that a lot of small business owners are inclined to wait until after Thanksgiving to really promote their holiday activities and events. But did you know that each year about 40 percent of consumers begin their holiday shopping before Halloween.? Yes! And according to the National Retail Federation, this number is growing each year. And likewise, this same retail organization reports that "20 to 40 percent of all sales for small and mid-sized retailers take place within the last two months of the year."

​By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President​

We know it may sound a little crazy, but it's time to start thinking about the holidays and your holiday-related events and promotions. No really. According to the National Retail Federation, "each year about 40 percent of consumers begin their holiday shopping before Halloween." Now that's scary. 

But while it's time to start planning your Holiday promotions, it's also time to continue executing on your email campaigns. And to that end Constant Contact has come out with a short list of themes and ideas to keep you engaged with your customers throughout the month of September. We also offer some additional tips and ideas about each theme below the infographic.

​By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President​

Back in April, Constant Contact announced a set of new features that make emailing your customers and contacts easier and faster. The new features also allow your templates and content to be more powerful and provide more value to your recipients. Check out this overview video:

​By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President​

The success of email marketing is not slowing down, in fact, quite the opposite. In 2015 Constant Contact reported that the return on investment for email marketing was $38.00 for every one dollar spent. In 2018, ESPs are now reporting an increase in ROI to $44.00 per $1.00 spent.

Need more encouragement to focus on email marketing? There's this datapoint to consider: "90% of customers prefer to receive company updates via newsletters over Facebook updates," according to research from Nielsen Norman Group. That same research shows at least 50% of subscribers made a purchase that was influenced by content in an email newsletter. 

​Understanding best practices and inherent pitfalls is critical to the success of your email marketing campaigns.

Sometimes you just get stuck. Trying to come up with engaging ideas to wow your blog readers, social media followers, and email recipients can be a challenge - especially for small business marketers! 

But with statistics and pundits pointing to the the growing use of social media, you've got to stay on top of your game. Take this quote from Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey, "According to Sprout Social, about 74% of consumers make a purchasing decision based on their social media accounts." 74 percent! So if you're not taking advantage of these social platforms to engage your customers and drive traffic both to your website and to your place of business, well, you may be losing out on sales. 

So how do you get unstuck and come up with ideas for great new posts and blog articles? Keep this content idea cheat sheet handy and refer to it for inspiration whenever you need it.