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The best email marketing strategy for small business is to segment customer data, increase purchase activity among segments, and use segmentation data to identify new customers. Small businesses that communicate with customers using online newsletters, email blast software and social media now have the power that was once only afforded to large corporations with huge budgets.
Building Business in The Network Economy
Barry Diller, a famous media mogul, left traditional media behind in the mid ‘90s to build an empire where his company, IAC, now owns 150 popular websites.
His personal wealth has amassed to over $2 Billion from this online strategy. One facet of IAC’s strategy is the cross-referencing of data from IAC’s stable of sites to identify new customers, trends and opportunities. Using this same strategy, and some of the best email service providers available, any small business can tap into a similar network strategy.
Become a Small Business Media Mogul
The basis of any media plan is ‘reach and frequency’. Reaching the right prospects, with the right message, several times to make an impact. When I developed newspaper ad campaigns, the rule of thumb for my industry was that the ad had to appear consecutively for 13 weeks to fully saturate the market. That’s a lot of money spent to reach a broad, not very targeted audience.
To reach highly targeted prospects, I also developed a network of marketing partners. Our partner promotional campaign objective was to generate trial, and capture new customers into our CRM database. Customers were segmented based on purchase patterns, age, income, geography and other factors. The best marketing campaign reached prospects that we knew from partner data used our competitors.
providers that will open their extended network to build new customers for you
Today small business can use services such as MailChimp, Jango Mail, Campaigner and many others to segment and track customer data. Recently I came across a service when I was looking into the MailChimp help pages about their Wavelength product. As a service to customers, MailChimp will “analyze your MailChimp list, then compare it to all other MailChimp lists. It looks for subscriber overlap, then recommends similar publishers by showing you screenshots of the email campaigns they’ve sent.”
On a small scale, this process emulates the Barry Diller strategy of cross-referencing data from a stable of sites and seeks out marketing relationships to offer prospects promotions that encourage trial.
Seek Out True Network Marketing Partners
The best email marketing strategy for small business is to seek out newsletter and email service providers that will open their extended network to build new customers for you. MailChimp, for example has over 2 million customers, that’s a lot of cross-referencing opportunity! Now that you know how Mr. Diller amassed a personal wealth of $2 Billion using this strategy, isn’t it time to start making the network economy work for your business?