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Some Effective Marketing Strategies For Your Startup:

1. Video Email

When was the last time you got a video email? For most people, it would be either never or remembering when one came since they are so rare. 

Anyhow, the point remains the same; video emails are an excellent way to burst through the uproar and capture the attention of your target audience. 

Karan Nijhawan (1), the founder of JUBE (which stands for Just Be), uses this approach to record his video messages:

• Greet your audience and catch their attention by addressing something personal like a recent article you published or a press release.
• Offer your audience some value and explain why you reach out to them. For example, you can talk about issues your customers faced and how you have solved them.
• Finish your video with open questions like “what would you like to talk more about…” 

The key is to take the pressure of your audience and show them you are not looking for sales. 

Yet, it is still not broadly accepted because video in an email is still tricky. Yet, we can say that video marketing will be more widespread in the future (2, 3, 4).

You can use video email marketing as a powerful tool to tap the growing internet audience with effective planning and management. 

Benefits of Video Email

The greatest benefit of a video email is it hooks viewers and accelerates overall engagement. Here are some additional benefits: 

• Greater Impact: People find watching videos more interesting and active than plain old texts
• Saves Time: Videos allow to give information in less time while also making complex topics easy to understand
• Virality: Videos have an excellent way of delivering messages and can easily go viral
• SEO: Video emails have improved Google search ranking since they draw more attention

Video Emails Help Boost Sales

When you rely too much on written words, sending your message the right way can be difficult. It takes longer to type out ideas and even harder to convey empathy and trust. Moreover, your audience receives hundreds of text sales emails every day. And each of them looks the same, plain and monotonous. In short, our brains have been wired to forget texts while getting better at remembering faces.

Video emails allow you to stand out, humanize conversations, and engage audiences like never before. Like texts, you can also use video emails at every step of your sales journey, from reaching out to arranging meetings and closing sales (5). 

For instance, Patagonia (6) often includes a video in their product-related emails to tell the story behind their product development. 

Another example is Etsy (7), which often uses video emails to show its company culture.

The video offers a peek into how Etsy employees use its hair products in their daily routines. It adds a sense of reliability and normalcy to the company. It allows the audience to see the people behind the marketing emails and see employees who are just like you and me. 

How to Start

First, you need to plan your campaign. 

• Start by asking the purpose of your campaign, like generating leads, announcing important events, creating brand awareness, etc.
• Outline your campaign and your strategies
• Research
• Find your target prospects.
• Create a budget and stick with it
• Prepare a to-do list and adhere to it. 

Next comes shooting your videos and starting your video email marketing campaign.

• Make sure to keep it good quality
• Keep them short and interesting (one to two minutes are ideal)
•  Always test them out before you send them on different channels 
• You can also try breaking your one-long message into a series of smaller videos
• Include a CTA in your video emails
• Avoid autoplay, give your audience their space and click on your videos
• Prefer single tap
• Include customer testimonials and interviews
• Give your videos a personal touch
• Don’t use too many exclamation points
• Avoid using uppercase for all your written content
• Avoid dazzling colors
• Consider spam filters and email fire while creating your video emails

You can use services like Mailchimp, BombBomb, Tailored Mail, Constant Contact to ease your overall video email marketing tasks. 

At present, the digital market is buzzing about the upbeat of video marketing from both marketers and viewers. And you can also plan a video email marketing campaign for your business. Still, confused about out-of-the-box video email content ideas? Head towards YouTube. 

And if at one point you find it pretty hectic to produce new videos for every email campaign, find out different ways to use the ones you already have and repurpose them for your audience. 

Read Also: Rural Marketing in the Post-COVID Era: A Lucrative Space

2. Personalized Marketing

No, no, we are not talking about big data and targeted emails. Instead, we ask you to make a u-turn in your marketing approach and use personalized gestures to make your prospects feel special and connected. Show your customers that you appreciate that, mean it, and you will have the deal done before you will even have to pitch the idea. 

It is important for brands, especially customer-centric ones, to ensure that they are connected. After all, your customers drive your business. 

Here are some common strategies you can adapt to make your customers feel special.

• Avoid one-size-fits-all approach
• Respond to your customers’ concerns
• Offer special discounts for customer loyalty, recommend really specific products based on your customers’ interest, and always address any unpleasant experience
• Follow up with your customers and let them know they matter
• Use your customers’ preferred communication methods 
• Be active on social media channels where most of your customers are
• Build long-term loyalty by always prioritizing your existing customers over acquiring new potential customers
• Improve your offerings via customers surveys and let your customers know you have addressed their concerns to build loyalty

Below are other special gestures we believe will help you make your customers feel special and connected:

Time to Bring Back Handwritten Notes

As we mentioned above, our brain is pretty good at ignoring emails and ads. 

But, there is one thing that would work well even today, “handwritten note.”

Now, you may ask, “who has time for it?”

However, according to available statistics, handwritten notes are more likely to get opened and read (99%) than emails with an average open rate of 20%.

It also offers an excellent way to stand out from competitors and add a personal connection to your consumers, especially in this digital world where handwritten letters have become so rare (8, 9, 10). 

Moreover, people often choose to keep handwritten letters because they are not only letters; they are gifts. The longer your notes sit on top of your customers’ desks, the more likely they will think positively of you and remember you. 

Apart from your customers, you can also send a handwritten note to someone:

• for sending you a business referral
• an employee doing an excellent job
• after a pitch meeting
• after signing a client
• receiving a large purchase from your customer
• Make your long-term customers feel special
• Celebrate big moments (like birthdays, festive season, anniversaries, etc.)
• Apologize if you have made a mistake
• Follow up with lapsed clients
• You can also send handwritten notes for no reason at all, especially to your best customers 

Of course, we don’t want to spend hundreds of hours writing personal handwritten notes to each of your partners and clients. Instead, you can outsource the same with companies like Simply Noted, Zapier, Indian Handwritten Letter Co, CallyAlly, LetteraMail, etc.

Read Also: Best Content Marketing Tools For Your Startup (2021)

After the end of the day, creating a successful business depends on your relationships with your customers, partners, vendors, and employees. While people often turn to digital communication to reach their potential prospects efficiently, no digital means can be as accomplished as a handwritten note. 

Here are some tips to stand out with handwritten notes:

• Make your notes personal (your note should offer feelings that the note is only written for them)
• Don’t go for the hard sell on your notes
• Don’t stress too much about style but do care about your spelling and grammar
• Ensure your tone is right and give your letter a human touch
• Keep it short; about five sweet sentences are recommended to impress your prospects (too short will make you look abrasive, and anything longer will dilute your message)

At first, you can start with a few manually-written notes, and once you see the results and start getting the value, you can start it at scale. 

Read Also: GenZ Marketing: Brands Need to Go Beyond Advertising

Send Gift Cards

These days, customers are increasingly aware that businesses offer gift cards to tempt them to revisit and make them purchase something they won’t even need because of gift cards or often with a short validity so they could never use them (11, 12, 13). Don’t issue gift cards with wicked intentions. Instead, start offering them a real value via gift cards that would result in increased loyalty. 

Send gift cards as a part of your loyalty platform to your customers, vendors, partners from time to time. If you have a smartphone app, take it a step further and make those gift cards accessible via the app as well. 

If you are an Amazon-listed seller, you can offer Amazon gift cards, Amazon Prime, or Audible membership codes under the Amazon Incentives program to reward new customers or acquire new ones too (14). 

One of the best strategies we found was partnering with other companies and offering their gift cards. It allows you to strengthen the relationship with your partners while also increasing customer loyalty. In short, it is a strategy that is a win-win for all parties involved.

One example of such cross-promotion via gift cards is Merrel and Subaru. After Subaru presented sponsorship for Merrel’s Down & Dirty Mud and Obstacle Series, Subaru offered 100 USD gift cards to each customer who took a test drive (15). 

It allowed Subaru to drive traffic to their dealerships while also introducing their customers to the Merrell brand.

You can also take it further by offering Starbucks gift cards or gift cards of any other brands you know your clients like whenever they close a deal with you. 

Other ways to use gift cards include:

• encouraging customers to purchase abandoned carts
• to increase your brand awareness
• increase social media engagements
• as a response to complaints (after acknowledging and resolving those issues!)
• seasonal and special occasions approach

Other unorthodox marketing ideas to stand out include gamifying your offerings and street placement – an oldie but goody.

Rucha Joshi, currently managing a team of over 20 content writers at TimesNext is fueled by her passion for creative writing. She is eager to turn information into action. With her hunger for knowledge, she considers herself a forever student and a passionate leader.