As a retail store owner today, you will definitely look for various and innovative ways to attract new customers and retain current customers. As we know it is expensive to operate a retail store so having constant stream of customers is crucial for a retail business survival. To attract more sales, you may resort to various marketing methods such as advertising and promotion but they could be expensive and hard to track their effectiveness. In this post, we are going to look at one effective and yet affordable marketing tool – email marketing.
Email marketing has become an indispensable marketing and communication tool for most businesses today. It has replaced direct mailer to become one of the most popular and well-liked marketing media because it is fast, affordable and effective. With everyone having an email address today, it is not difficult to reach them via email marketing especially people read their emails on their smart phones now. This gives great opportunity for retail store owners to reach their customers almost 24×7.
Your Customers Are Your Best Sales Person
If you think your sales rely on how well your sales staff can sell, think again! Your sales do not just rely on your own sales staff only but your customers as well. If your customers are happy with your product and services rendered, they will help you to spread the word by telling their friends, colleagues and family members. So your customers are in fact your best sales person and email marketing makes it easier for your customers to do it. In email marketing, it has a forward feature which allows your customers to forward any promotion or announcement you sent to them to their friends, colleagues and family. These receipients are more likely to make a purchase than other people because they are recommended by those who they trust.
So if you are the retail store owner, you should not overlook this important group of customers as they could be your huge potential sales generator. You should reward them handsomely for their efforts. The email marketing system is able to keep track of who actually made the effort to forward to their friends. This makes it easy for your to identify and reward them accordingly.
Effective Tracking Tool
It might not be easy to track the performance of your offline advertising and promotion activities but email marketing has a statistic feature that tells you how your promotion activities are performing specifically. It tells you who are the customers who have open your email, who clicked on it and who have taken action as instructed on your email. It will also tells you who are the customers whose emails are invalid and who are the ones not opening your email. This information helps you to adjust your future sales and promotion campaigns so that you can achieve the most optimal result as possible.
In addition, the report is available in graphical format if you do not want too many technical details. The graph as shown below gives you a quick overview of how each of your promotions is performing. It allows you to compare each campaign performance and see whether each campaign is worth its return of investment (ROI).
Huge Time and Cost Savers
Every retail store owners know how designing and printing of their marketing collaterals take time and cost. It is almost impossible to make last-minute changes especially during the festive and holidays periods as retail stores need to cater for the time-sensitive period. As a result, some of retail store owners may not able to promote the desired products or pricing on time.
Fortunately, email marketing allow you to make last-minute changes even to the very last-minute. Revised promotion can be send out almost immediately to every customers without going through another round of time-consuming designing and printing cycle. You can even inform your customers immediately if you spot any error or mistakes during your promotion. This helps to salvage your business reputation and a huge time and cost savers for your marketing efforts.
Break the Physical Store Constraint and Connect with Customers Online
It is not enough to have a physical retail store to keep constant contact with your customers; you have to constant contact with them virtually online too. The reason is simple; you might not be able to operate your retail store in one physical location indefinitely. There could be various reasons that you are forced to move your store to other location. The last thing you ever want your customers to know is you have moved without informing them, they will definitely feel lost and frustrated.
Hence it is even more crucial to keep in touch with your customers online regardless of your whereabouts. By having their email addresses in the email marketing system, you could quickly inform every single of your customers about your new store and invite them over to the new store with special discount. The email marketing system is a good broadcast tool so you are ensured that none of your customers will miss out the news. This helps you continue enjoying repeat business from them and not losing any of your old customers. Consequently, you can develop a base of loyal customers and follow you whenever you move.
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There are a lot of more benefits that email marketing can bring to your retail store business, if you are interested to know how it work, you can check out more features by clicking here. It has a trial version which allows you to try the full email marketing features for free for 30 days so do utilize this opportunity and see how email marketing can work wonder for your retail store business.