So, you’re a small business owner. You have a Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo email account. The questions become “Is that enough?” and “What benefits do an Email Marketing Platform provide?”.
In response to the first question, no.
Regular email services are not actually tailored to sending out a bunch of marketing emails. Yeah, you could build a list in Outlook and do a mass send to your customers, and I suppose if you only have 30-50 customers that might be enough, but will Outlook send an email reminder that an online shopping cart still has items in it? You get my point.
Syncing an online store to an email marketing provider is where some of the real magic is. You can pull data from your online store to generate email lists of previous customers, send out shopping cart notifications, send out shipping information, do birthday reminders, send out “specials deal alerts”, and pull templates to make your emails seem more professional.
What about the service industry?
Not every email marketing provider has the option of using SMS inside of one program like Pushsent.com does. That said, I’ll demonstrate the value.
The service industry relies on appointments or timing. People do not generally open emails at the same frequency that they open text messages. Myself, I’m lucky if I check my email every other day. I ask the following questions?
If you’re a Yoga studio but you have to cancel class, what is the easiest and best way to let all of you clients know?
If you’re a dentist office, what is the best way to remind clients of their appointments?
If you’re carpet cleaning service, what is the best way to verify appointments?
I think you get the point. Text message is the most efficient method of communication with customers when timing is important.
Now, if you can couple SMS with Email.
What about sending out appointment reminders, and you can send invoices?
You can let clients know when you are canceling class via text message, but let them know of special deals or services via email?
Ok, what about Push Notifications? As I mentioned above, I’m lucky if I check my email every other day. That’s even with it synced on my phone. Push notifications that engage customers when they are actually at their computer reaches online customers when they are more likely to be in a position to buy.
Sure, emails can let people know of deals, but unless they drop what they are doing and go shopping they might forget.
Push notifications are a great way to gently remind or inform people of new content, new deals, new services, or new products.
I can finish off by saying “Can you do what I mentioned above with Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo?”
No, you can’t, but you can inside of Pushsent.com