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What Challenges Do Entrepreneurs Face In Digital Marketing?

If you are stepping into the field of digital marketing as an entrepreneur to grow your business then know that it is a great field that can increase your brand awareness but there are some enormous challenges and obstacles for people who are new to this field. Digital marketing is becoming popular with every passing day as its results are better than traditional advertising and it is cost-effective. Plus, the increased penetration of the internet has further helped in the growing popularity of digital marketing.

But there are a lot of challenges for beginners in the field of digital marketing that we are going to discuss shortly. Those entrepreneurs who are new to the field of digital marketing aren’t able to get promising results and their startups fail to do much in digital marketing but worry not. You just need to be careful in this field, keep your ground in front of the challenges that await your way and you will be able to succeed in digital marketing campaigns. So, here are the common challenges that entrepreneurs faced in digital marketing as a beginner:

Insignificant Knowledge About Digital Marketing
Most entrepreneurs and startups don’t have enough knowledge about the field of digital marketing due to which they struggle and mess everything up. It is a common problem, not in the field of digital marketing but in any other field. If you don’t have significant knowledge about a field and you jump right into it then you are going to make things even worse.

To be able to come up with promising results in the field of digital marketing, you should learn more about this vast field, gather some knowledge, and stay updated with the latest digital marketing tools and trends that are being used in this field before you actually jump into this field.

Low Budget
Budget and Capital, are the two things that play a significant role in any business category. Without a budget, no campaign or business can run. In the field of digital marketing, you must have a budget for your marketing campaigns that will help you reach your estimated target. Sometimes, it may be required to boost your content which also requires a budget. So, you have a budget pre-planned for digital marketing or else you will struggle.

Fail To Draw The Attention Of The Targeted Audience
People who don’t have knowledge about the field of digital marketing aren’t able to draw the attention of their targeted audience. To succeed in generating leads, it is important to draw the attention of the targeted audience to your products/services. It is beneficial for your business as it increases its popularity and you also get the attention of the audience that you were targeting.

Based on the products and services that your startup provides, you should have a rough understanding of the interest of your potential audience. Therefore, you should understand the interests of your audience and provide them with content that will catch their attention and will help generate leads. For instance, if you have a startup program similar to Omegle then targeting those people who wish to meet new people would be the ideal choice with content that they wish to see.

Ignore ROI
Another challenge or mistake you can say that startup owners make is that they ignore the ROI or Return On Investment. They start a marketing campaign and don’t even measure the progress of their campaign and whether it is generating results or not. Determining the ROI is helpful to measure how good your investment is turning out to be or not. If the ROI is good then it shows that you are going with a good strategy but if ROI is bad then you need to change your marketing strategies.

Unfortunately, people who are new to this field ignore the ROI due to which they are unable to predict the appropriate return on their investment and don’t make any changes to their marketing strategies. You wouldn’t see startups like Chatroulette making such a mistake.

Read more: What Challenges Do Entrepreneurs Face In Digital Marketing?

Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

Marketers use various strategies for firms to market and raise brand awareness. Social media marketing and email marketing are two of the most popular and successful ways to accomplish marketing objectives. Both are magnificent in their own ways. As of 2021, there were around 3.78 billion users of social media and 4.1 billion users of email globally, according to Statista. This amount represents about 48% of the world’s population.

Social networking is becoming more and more popular every day. Nevertheless, we are unable to control how emails affect their users’ ability to transact. The issue at hand is which is superior. Which of the two can influence the target audience more effectively?

What is Email Marketing?
A type of digital marketing called email marketing uses emails to spread brand recognition. It informs customers about the newest items, discounts, and services to help them remember the brand. The following are some advantages of email marketing:

  1. Strengthen Relationships, Loyalty & Trust
    Building individualised interactions with present and potential clients through email marketing is a terrific strategy. The readers of your newsletters and emails will come to know, like, and trust you and your business if you write them well. Consumers also do business with trusted companies.
  2. Increase Brand Awareness & Stay Top of Mind
    Consumers are reminded of your business, products, and services every time an email is delivered to them. This helps customers remember your business when it’s time to make a purchase.
  3. Segmentation
    Email marketing allows you to establish lists of each market segment based on demographics, interests, previous behaviour, etc. This allows you to develop marketing messages that are specifically tailored to each target audience. With the help of this incredibly successful marketing strategy, each segment will closely relate to your marketing message.
  4. Low Cost & Good ROI
    Comparatively speaking to other marketing strategies, email marketing is relatively affordable. For every dollar invested, email marketing typically returns $44.25 in profit.
  5. Easy to Use
    An email campaign may be set up quite quickly. You may upload subscriber information, segment your lists, use email templates, fill in your content, and send out emails to subscribers regularly using the many resources and software providers for email marketing available online. Constant Contact and Mail Chimp are two of our preferred email marketing services providers. Instead of using a pre-made template, having a customised email template that aligns with your company’s brand can be much more successful.

Read more: Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

What Digital Marketers Should Know About Direct Mail

Since I founded Gunderson Direct roughly 20 years ago, I’ve had a number of conversations where I’ve defended direct mail to digital marketers. It seems that our channel is just not as well understood as most others, so I’ve done my share of explaining.

Here is just some of what I say to help them understand how direct mail can help them.

• It has unique targeting capabilities: Cookie concerns? IP identification issues? A physical address is the most reliable contact information for prospecting. Direct mail datasets are appended with thousands of attributes—both demographic and behavioral—that are available for targeting. And you can apply AI and machine learning to model builds across numerous databases to constantly improve direct mail’s look-alike targeting capabilities.

• You can go bigger and cheaper (per impression): Scaling in digital typically means upping your bids to compete for a relatively fixed ad inventory. There is no bidding war to get into your prospect’s physical mailbox. In fact, the direct mail industry is set up to reward companies that scale, offering ever-improving manufacturing and data efficiencies as quantities increase. Scale a DM program, and your cost per impression typically drops.

• Omnichannel DM strategies can boost your response: The same data used to target a prospect’s mailbox can be used to target them digitally. Automated display (no cookies needed) and email touches, combined with the USPS’ free Informed Delivery program, can strategically surround the physical delivery of printed mailing withs additional impressions. We’ve found that these “digital surrounds” can improve overall campaign response by as much as 40%.

• Direct mail stands out: It’s often said that the average consumer encounters as many as 10,000 ads a day. Compare that to how many pieces of mail are delivered to your home each day. Importantly, ads in digital and traditional channels often interrupt your entertainment or information consumption, so they are often missed and easily dismissed. But direct mail consumption takes place away from a screen and can be reviewed at a prospect’s leisure.

• It makes an impression: People depend on physical mail to receive information from government and business institutions, making it a trusted source of communications. Furthermore, research shows that physical ads are remembered more quickly and elicit a stronger emotional response than digital ads.

Read more: What Digital Marketers Should Know About Direct Mail

This Holiday Season Play The Long Game With Email Marketing

As we predicted, promotional email volume has skyrocketed this year as brands worked to retain and reengage customers because of pandemic-related shutdowns. And marketers facing the decline of third-party cookies are now chasing first-party data through — you guessed it — email relationships. Inbox placement and reputation management vendor Validity finds that global inbox volume has increased 94% since Q3 2020. Competition for email attention and email data is tougher than ever.

The stakes around your email program are higher. Because of data deprecation, first-party data is gold. And email addresses unlock user identity and permission — keys to this treasure. So responsibly collecting email registrations, preserving relationships with good sending behavior, and enhancing user profiles through regular email interactions isn’t just about getting more opens and clicks. Improving deliverability now makes or breaks your entire customer data strategy. Here is how to do right with email marketing this holiday season:

  • Don’t get lured into the temptation of over-messaging. We get the appeal of sending just one more message when you are facing looming Q4 transaction goals. But wearing out your list now sacrifices longer-term revenue, compromises your sender reputation, and potentially deletes forever the identifier you need to stay in touch with a customer. GDPR allows that users can request that their data be permanently erased from a marketing database if requested.
  • Keep registration customer led. Boxed and Rue La La now require registration just to browse their sites. But we advise not forcing a customer’s hand. Let customers control their opt-in. Rent the Runway’s omnichannel preference center collects explicit proclivities and zero-party data such as user size and style searches for use in product recommendations. And Dollar Tree gives subscribers a chance to change contact information, desired message type, and frequency.
  • Deliver value to customers. We bet your email strategy over-indexes on accomplishing your Q4 goals — sales volume, revenues, inventory liquidation. This is the case for most emailers. But the best way to win this holiday and still have a database and solid sending reputation is to give customers what they want, rather than forcing them into your path to purchase. As Validity found, Red Letter Days increased inbox placement when it targeted emails to user behavior and preference. And improved inbox placement boosted opens and clicks, which generated more data for better targeting. This virtuous cycle increased revenue attributed to email by 10%. Email marketing vendors like Bluecore and Cordial collect and make usable non-email data (like point-of-service data, supply chain updates, or SKU-level metadata) to improve message relevance.

Read more: This Holiday Season Play The Long Game With Email Marketing

Email marketing is bigger than ever, so here’s how your small business should do it

Email is a critical marketing tool. Research firm Statistica reports that, in 2020, about 306 billion emails were sent and received every day worldwide, and this figure is projected to increase to more than 376 billion daily emails within the next few years.

That should not surprise anyone running a small business. According to recent research from Campaign Monitor, an email marketing platform, 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers.

Unfortunately, there is still a great deal of confusion among small-businesses owners about how to best deploy email marketing.

For starters, you don’t want to send hundreds or thousands of emails from your company’s mail server unless you enjoy getting into a fight with your internet service provider. That’s why it’s always best to subscribe to a bulk email service such as Constant Contact, Mailchimp, AWeber, or Emma. Besides providing templates and assistance for sending out email campaigns, the primary job of these services is to make sure that your email gets delivered.

The good ones will have best practices and actively enforce opt-in and data rules to ensure that you are not sending spam or messages to people who don’t want to hear from you. Because of these controls, the major mail providers such as Gmail, which recognizes that delivery is coming from a vetted source, are less inclined to block your messages or send them to spam.

What about content? The rule of thumb is that it should be short and mostly non-promotional. That’s because no one wants to receive advertisements. Your community will want information that will help. This information can be about your products but also include thought leadership, insights, and advice.

“If your email marketing is all about ‘buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff,’ then you’re not providing any kind of value,” says Bonny Clayton, a Media-based web design and marketing specialist. “Keep doing that and your email list is going to die.”

Clayton also recommends that if you’re sharing a blog or information about a new product, “don’t give them the whole kit and caboodle in the email. Whet their appetite, pique their interest in the email, and then say, learn more by having a big juicy button for clicking.”

Read more: Email marketing is bigger than ever, so here’s how your small business should do it

How, why every artist should use email marketing in 2021

The current musical landscape consists of a melting pot of artists, all bidding for the attention of audiences with 12-second attention spans.  While social media is great when it comes to building an engaging brand story and identity, artists like you need to take their marketing efforts one step further.

That’s where email marketing comes in. Email is the tried-and-tested medium that can turn someone who stumbled upon your music into a long-term fan.

Why is email marketing beneficial to musicians?

Email is the internet’s currency. Anyone who’s online has an email address.

90% of emails get delivered straight to your intended recipient’s inbox. Conversely, only 2% of your Facebook audience see your posts. If you’ve got 1000 followers on Facebook, only 20 of them will see your post. If you have 1000 people on your mailing list, 900 individuals will receive your email in their inbox. That’s quite a difference!

Email is also one of the most powerful conversion channels out there. The average click-through rate of any given email is approximately 3%, compared to Instagram’s 0.22%. This makes a big difference when talking about overall revenue, merch sold and gig tickets purchased.

It’s also important to consider the fact that many people use social media to communicate with loved ones and to pass the time. On the other hand, email is a more professional communication medium. In fact, 49% of consumers prefer receiving marketing messages via email.

Then there’s also the indisputable fact that email is one of the most stable communication channels on the net. The first email campaign was sent in 1978 to 400 people. Marketers haven’t looked back ever since. By 2013, 53% of marketers agreed that email is the most effective communication channel. In 2020, around 306 billion e-mails were sent and received every day globally. This figure is set to increase to over 376 billion daily e-mails in 2025. Social media platforms come and go – but email has stayed and conquered.

Read more: How, why every artist should use email marketing in 2021

Optimizing Your Email Marketing In 2021

Digital marketing has more than shown its worth for businesses of all industries over the past year, and one strategy that’s been particularly valuable has been email marketing.

Email marketing is arguably more important now than it ever was before. However, while email marketing is extremely important right now, it can also be difficult to do well. If you want to get all of the benefits of email marketing, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with all of the best practices and stay current with the latest trends.

Don’t miss the impact that good email marketing can have on your business going forward. Use these tips to optimize your email marketing in 2021 and start appealing more to your audience.

Give emails a personal touch.

You’re probably already aware of the overwhelming amount of emails that people get each day, as you likely deal with this yourself. We all get tons of emails from businesses, and many of them don’t even look like they were meant for us specifically.

Generic emails sent out to all your contacts that don’t apply to a particular group of people or an individual won’t have much of an impact and could end up just getting deleted.

In 2021, personalization is one of the most important things you can do for your marketing efforts, especially email marketing. The more relevant you can make something, the more potential it has to be effective.

No one wants to spend their time reading emails that weren’t intended for them, and they definitely won’t feel compelled to do whatever the email is asking of them.

Ensure that you’re creating emails with relevant information for certain groups so that it appeals to their needs and interests. To personalize even further, include the recipient’s name, so they know they’re getting an email meant for them, not just anyone.

Boost engagement with interactive features.

Personalization isn’t the only way for getting users to be more engaged when reading your emails. While you may be able to write engaging content to keep your audience interested, adding interactive features to some of your emails is a great way of boosting agreement. This gives them more than just text to read when they open your emails.

Read more: Optimizing Your Email Marketing In 2021

Can BIMI Help Marketers Build Customer Trust?

BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) enables marketers to add a logo to their emails in the inbox so subscribers can quickly identify their messages and trust that they’re from the right sender. It can do for email marketing what https in front of a web address did for websites.

It provides a shortcut for consumers to decide whether or not to trust an email and gives them the confidence they need before opening an email as to whether it’s what it says it is or if it’s some sort of scam. The visual cue that BIMI provides may create trust and lead to fewer unsubscribes and spam complaints, and boost the deliverability of your email marketing messages.

At the beginning of the year, we wrote an article on building customer trust with BIMI. Now that Google has general support for BIMI in its inboxes, we asked marketers about their thoughts on how BIMI will change email marketing.

How Will BIMI Change Email Marketing? 

Like other email authentication standards, BIMI is essentially a text file in a specific format. BIMI helps organizations enhance their return on a channel that they already control and delivers a strong payoff for minimal investment.

BIMI files live on your sending servers and give the receiving inbox information about the sender. BIMI uses the DKIM, SPF, and DMARC protocols, which makes protecting a brand from fraud easier for email marketers, but that’s just one side of the benefits of BIMI. Let’s take a closer look.

Read more: Can BIMI Help Marketers Build Customer Trust?

Email Marketing: Still a Customer Engagement Workhorse

Consumers have never had so many ways to engage with brands, but despite that, a majority of them still prefer the old reliable channel of email marketing. With so much buzz around social media, SMS text messaging, and push notifications, it might seem like the right time to deprioritize email as an engagement channel. But new research shows that would be a huge mistake.

MoEngage conducted a consumer survey across four key global markets: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany. The goal was to understand better what consumers expect in communications from brands and how they want their personal data used by brands to deliver a better experience. We learned from this exercise that 33% of all respondents still put email at the top of the list when it comes to preferred engagement channels.

In fact, 39% of global respondents said they would like to receive weekly emails from their favorite brands that contain highly personalized offers. This same survey did show an increase in the adoption of mobile apps, SMS, push notifications, and chatbots as engagement channels – and these are still important as part of your multichannel strategy. Yet, email still reigns supreme. Why?

Here are the top six reasons brands must place email marketing at the top of their priority list:

It Reaches an Audience That Wants to Be There

Email marketing is the best method of direct response marketing there is. That’s because users have raised their hands and actively opted into hearing from you, so they’re more willing to open them to learn about the latest products, sales and personalized offers based on their previous purchase history.

Email is Ubiquitous

While not every global consumer has a social media account, it’s a safe bet they have an email address. Whether you’re enticing new customers or trying to reengage with your existing base, email is still highly valued across internet users. Even in emerging countries where reliable internet infrastructure is not widespread, email is the de facto communication tool. In 2019, the number of global email users was 3.9 billion, and by 2024 is expected to reach 4.3 billion.

Personalization is Easy with Email

Email marketing began as a one-way broadcast to reach the largest possible number of potential customers. Fast forward to today, when advancements in AI, data collection, audience segmentation and analysis make it easier than ever for marketers to create highly personalized email messages.

Read more: Email Marketing: Still a Customer Engagement Workhorse

Email Marketing Isn’t Dead, but Old Practices Have Become Obsolete

It’s true that talks about the demise of email marketing have been going on for quite some time. “Social media is taking over”, “other marketing channels are more efficient” and numerous similar myths have been circling around.   The reality however is different! Nobody is pulling the plug on email just yet. Despite the obvious rise of social media in our everyday lives, people still receive emails in their inboxes and they expect it more than ever. The email remains the “king” among digital marketing channels driving a tremendous ROI for businesses.  

What seems to be dead (or obsolete, to be exact) are the strategies used and the email marketing methodology followed by some businesses!  

THE TRUTH ABOUT EMAIL MARKETING While email marketing is not something new, it’s still alive and kicking and far from dead according to the numbers. Specifically, according to recent statistics, email is an integral part of our daily online life. The number of global e-mail users in 2020 amounted to four billion and that number is expected to grow to 4.6 billion users in 2025.  

To put things into perspective, 3.6 billion people used social media in 2020. So, there are more people using email than social media.  

What’s even more interesting is the fact that the trend towards mobile devices has also affected emails, and almost 50% of total email opens occurred through mobile devices. So, people can effortlessly check their email even away from their PCs.  

As for the email’s effectiveness as a channel, 47% of marketers agreed that it is the most effective marketing channel, followed by social media marketing (39%), SEO (33%), and content marketing (33%).  

What’s also changed throughout the years is the affordability and functionality of email marketing services. The market is now full with robust tools with advanced features, while their pricing is affordable even for start-ups and small businesses. Some of the top email newsletter software right now can be found here.  

Read more: Email Marketing Isn’t Dead, but Old Practices Have Become Obsolete