These days, almost everyone has email. It’s a free, powerful, basically limitless service allowing people to be contacted anywhere and at any time. This is ideal for businesses, since it guarantees an audience. Some stats point out some remarkable numbers that would make any business salivate. There are 205 billion emails sent every day, with office workers receiving about 121 emails daily. There are 4.3 billion email users around the world.
As Inc.com points out, these kinds of stats mean it’s essential that businesses use email marketing – even if, increasingly, more people are using filters and other interventions to prevent businesses sending marketing material. “One reason email marketing has value for business owners is that it's an easy way to start reaching consumers on mobile without investing a lot in new technology or software.” Offering deals in emails also means more customers can click through to our websites directly. This means they land up immediately on our site and increases the chances of them becoming paying customers.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is also proving increasingly essential for marketing data. These systems are designed to acquire information on customers across a range of channels – or, rather, “points of contact” between customer and company. These points of contact, says TechTarget, include “websites, telephone, live chat, direct mail, marketing materials and social media.”
Modern innovation on CRM systems is focusing on the development of AI. As BetaNews highlights, one project is “designed to automate the analysis and interpretation of customer marketing campaigns behind the scenes and recommend actionable insights to help marketers improve their campaign performance.”
Today we can use certain software to manage emails, social media and so on. This is known as marketing automation software. This helps, given the huge amount of data that needs to be managed and which can be scheduled. However, this still means we need to have proper sales and marketing strategies in place – making these automatic is different to creating innovative marketing campaigns.
Before we even consider which of these apps and software types to begin using, we should have a handle on effective marketing as a whole. It might be wise to consider sales and marketing courses, then, before getting too fancy about the software we use.
