Email Marketing – Importance of Newsletters in Business

Email marketing is one of the effective ways to market your business. Over the years, emails has become one of the popular communication channels across the globe. Zimbabwe is no different. Although there are no recorded statistics on the penetration of emails in Zimbabwe, emails remain one of the popular method of communication. The advent of emails and it’s popularity resulted in email being used as an advertising channel, resulting in the introduction of email marketing. Email marketing in the form of newsletters has therefore become one of the most efficient ways for business to keep in touch with their customers. So what is email marketing?

What is email marketing?

Unlike your normal communication emails, email marketing is when you send communications using newsletters to your customers or people who might be interested in your product in the hope of getting them to use your product. For existing customers, email marketing is usually used by businesses to keep existing customers engaged with the objective of customer retention in mind.

Why do we do email marketing and does it still work?

Over the years, the rise in spam and unsolicited emails has made the benefits of email marketing questionable. However, despite the challenges associated with email marketing, it still remains a viable channel of marketing for all businesses despite their size. In fact, email marketing is a must for a business. There are tonnes of benefits for using email marketing. Here are some of the benefits which are more relevant especially within the Zimbabwean context:

Email Marketing is cheap – for a lot of businesses in Zimbabwe and other developing countries, cost is a big determining factor. A lot of business are struggling to keep their businesses afloat and marketing budgets have become close to non-existent as the marketing costs are considered as not being core to the business. However, this school of thought is affecting businesses in Zimbabwe, resulting in shrinking customer bases and declined growth for businesses. Marketing is core to a business and email marketing still remains as one of the cheaper options of marketing compared to other marketing channels such as tv, radio, print etc. From only $150 per month, Cyberplex Africa can create and send your newsletters.

It’s an easy way to keep your customers engaged – According to a study by Huang, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase the company’s revenue by 25%-85%. Believe it or not, there is great value in customer retention. But how do you retain customers? The number one strategy is engagement. Email marketing is an easy way to keep your customers engaged through keeping them informed. It’s also an easy way to reach out to your potential buyers or rather, keeping your leads engaged. So whether it’s informing customers of upcoming specials, new features, upcoming events or any developments within the organisation, email marketing is the most convenient way to reach out to your customers.

Email marketing is a more targeted form of marketing – With email marketing, you are able to segment your mailing list according to any criteria for of your choice for example age, gender, buying choices, business type etc. You can then send newsletters specifically targeted to a specific segment, making email marketing a more efficient way of marketing. Conversions are always better with more targeted campaigns.

In addition, emails can be personalised with email marketing. For example, you can address a customer by name if your database contains customer names.

It’s an easy way of strengthening your brand – It’s not only the flashy tv ads or the bright billboards you pass on the roads everyday that help in terms of building your brand. Email marketing is also another subtle but effective way of strengthening your brand. When you send regular newsletters to your database, the respondents might not find your use now, but when a need for your service arises, you will come to mind as customers keep your brand top of mind.
Sharing of information is easy with email marketing – Unlike print media, email marketing makes sharing of information easy. Respondents can simply forward the newsletter to their friends or colleagues, making it an easy method of spreading information. As a business, you can even ask your current customers to share the newsletter with their people in their databases.

How do i setup email marketing?

Remember, we said that email marketing are simply emails used for marketing. So since these emails are for marketing purposes, sending a plain text email like you normally do might not captivate the respondent’s attention, especially with tons of other emails waiting for the email respondent to attend to. So, instead of sending normal text emails, marketing emails are usually created using newsletter templates. Cyberplex Africa has a newsletter system designed for creating, managing and sending out newsletters. This ensures that your normal email stays clutter free and also avoids your domain being blocked by your ISP as sending too many emails at one go can be considered as spam. Moreso, the newsletter systems allows creation of well designed, uncluttered and mobile responsive templates which can be designed to your specifications or in line with your branding.

Secondly, you need a customer database which the newsletter will be sent to. When we say customer database, we simply mean your customer details. The primary details required for your database is the email address. Additional fields such as name of customer, surname, region, country, gender, sex, preferences, purchasing history etc can be added to the customer database. Don’t overthink this part. Your inboxes are a good starting point to find email if you do not have a customer database. The data can be captured and stored in an excel or csv file which can then be imported into the email marketing system which will be used for email marketing.

Once the newsletter and the customer database is ready, you are ready to send your newsletter. Test newsletters can be sent to check of errors and to ensure that the newsletter is in good order before sending out to your database. Statistics are also available which show you how many emails have been sent, the open rate, unsubscribes, click through rate etc.

What is the best email marketing service

We know that trying to create a newsletter for yourself can be overwhelming and you would rather leave this task to experts. Cyberplex Africa is currently the no 1 email marketing service provider in Zimbabwe. Cyberplex Africa will handle all your email marketing including:

Designing newsletter templates
Compiling the newsletter for you
Designing any additional artwork or images to accompany the newsletter
Setting up the customer database for you
Sending out your newsletter
Split testing your newsletter to check which subject line has a better open rate
Providing you with statistics for your newsletter send

Cyberplex provides all these services at a very cheap rate. So what are you waiting for? Contact us today and we will setup your newsletter today!

What do i need to provide Cyberplex to setup our newsletters

To setup your newsletter we require the following:

Customer database- if you do not have, make a list of your current customers email addresses. A good starting point is your business inbox. Your database usually grows organically over a period of time.

Content – Compile the specific content you would like to send out to your customers. The general rule is that 80% should be informative. 20% can be promotional. If you have no content, Cyberplex Africa can compile the content for you. You can simply provide us with a guideline.