 The side and where to invest your marketing bills is not a decision you take lightly as a small business or a growing one. You know you need to attract new customers and keep your existing clients coming back, but you can't afford to invest time or resources into something that is not going to deliver the results you expect. That's why email marketing is important when it comes to small business marketing and beyond. In order to make a decision on whether or not it is right for your business, it is important to know the benefits of email marketing. That's our focus on the show for today. Welcome to Business Insight and Plus TV Africa. I am Justin Acadone. Welcome back. The federal government says the foundation for a resurgent economy has been laid in the past eight years. The Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Faschula-Sentes, joined an interactive session between government officials and members of the organized private sector. Now the session is coming ahead of the general elections. Take a look. Members of the organized private sector, federal and Lagos state government officials gather here to dialogue on key economic reforms that will put Nigeria back under progressive lane. Governor Somolu takes to the podium to speak on his themes agenda and how impactful it has been over the years. The GDP of Lagos is clearly over 120 billion right now, so which makes it closer to 30% of the GDP of our country. And of course the GDP is bigger than the GDP of Kenya, it's bigger than GDP of Ghana, it's bigger than the GDP of Ivory Coast. And so you can see that indeed your city, your state is in itself a big country that we are all just struggling to fit into. The interactive forum breaks into a panel session. Thank you, we round of applause for him. Issues bordering on infrastructure, sustainable development goals, post-COVID-19 economy to immigration of Nigerians, top the discuss. We must all sit together and decide what we want. Infrastructure can never be seen as short-term, so we need to understand that it is a long-term strategy. How do we effectively work with you to make this a policy? So working with government, it's very important that you make it policy-driven for us as private sector to be able to work with you. According to the federal government, the country's infrastructure stock moved from 20 to 35% in seven years, despite being faced with the challenges brought by COVID-19. Based on the odds, this government and this party turned around what was the global impact at the local stage and we have had consecutive growth. What the presidential candidate by his manifesto and by our disposition want to do now is to multiply 3% growth to 7%, 8% and more growth so that the benefits can then be felt. We want more support participation from the private sector. We government alone cannot do this. We need your support and of course in two ways, private investment, corporate social responsibilities and other participation you can think of. If you look at the public expenditure to GDP ratio also, we are currently, as Nigeria, at about 13% of GDP. Again, even the African average is about 22%, not to talk of the content of Africa, people like South Africa. The consensus here is that with a symbiotic relationship between the government and the organized private sector, the economic drive of Lagos and the federal government can be sustained. And now to our discussion for today. The benefits of email marketing for small businesses are not always obvious. You know, marketing is being used by thousands of organizations to promote their businesses and to grow revenue. If you're under a fan-to-bot email or overwhelmed with information, we want to help you get started. My guest up where me Emmanuel is, the CEO and founder of Tribe Arc Limited, a company that develops, see itself as software that Africans use to build their businesses. As a senior software engineer, it manages all of Tribe Arc's product-related matters from product management to user experience, research and design to a product. Analytics, thanks for joining us on Business Insight and Plus TV Africa, Emmanuel. Thanks, Justin. All right, these indeed are a pleasure. Email marketing, it sounds so simple, but let's just then break it down. What exactly is it? All right, thanks Justin. Nice to be here again. Email marketing is simple. Like we said earlier, it's a form of marketing. We're in the oldest form of marketing that you've always seen around, but is that the marketing way you send promotional messages to your customers? Is that to generate leads, to generate sales, or to convert them, or to nurture them, or just to keep them promotional discounts, or just keep them updated about your product or services? So it's that simple. So how popular is it globally, and if we have to bring it closer home, is it something Nigerians are appreciative of or they've been using over time? Yeah, so some businesses are using it currently, but not all businesses are actually leveraging and maximizing the power of email marketing because email marketing is simple, it's very fast, it's direct, and it's the cheapest form of marketing. A lot of people still want to go for social media ads, you know, Google ads, Facebook ads and all of that, but that's more expensive, and with the constantly changing algorithm of these social media platforms, they reach organic reach when you do those ads, right? So when you go for email marketing, you're going to be getting a 200% return on investment when you use email. 200%? Yes. That's huge. Over double? Double, literally double. Oh yeah. According to Neopatter, it even says about 500%. Oh wow, that's huge. Okay, you said Nigerians are not fully, you know, harnessed all the benefits, the arrival dare of, can you walk us through these benefits, or just in case people are wondering why they need to get into email marketing? All right, so the most important benefit of email marketing is this, the fact that you can actually engage your customers directly and kind of get closer to them by what we call segmentation. So for example, if you have 2,000 followers or fans on Facebook, for example, and you have 2,000 email addresses on your email list, the truth is that if you send a post, you know, on your Facebook page and say, this is what's happening today, and all of that, out of your 2,000 fans on Facebook, only about 128 people, according to research, Upsport in particular, they said, according to Upsport, about 128 people are based on the algorithm of Facebook, only 128 people or users will see that your post because of the algorithm of Facebook. The same thing on Twitter. Even Twitter is about 1.2% of your posts are sent. But email, when you send email to 2,000 persons on your email list, the open rates globally, standard according to Upsport and other platforms, they said that globally about 60%, there is open rate of about 60%. That means that about 500 to 600 emails will be opened when you send to people on your email list as against sending a post. So what that means literally is that when you go with email marketing, you are going to have more engagement with your customer because they're going to be reading your messages, they're going to be seeing what you're saying, actually sell to them and convert them. Okay, let's talk about the segmentation that you clearly mentioned them, just how does it really work? Yeah, so Justin, thank you for that question again. So what I was saying about segmentation is this, people, you can actually, you can know more about your customers from segmentation. So when you send out an email, the first time someone comes to your website, for example, and you send them a message via email, you can put in some links in there to say, okay, I have a white shoe, I have a black shoe, which one would you prefer on a Sunday afternoon, for example. And then your customer, of course, opens this mail and then clicks one of the white shoe. The system automatically via automation, what we call email automation, sends a request back to the server saying that Justin, for example, likes white shoe and it separates you into a different email list, such that when you now visit my website tomorrow, I can already know that you like your white shoe and then I can be sending to you subsequent emails about just white shoe and nothing anymore about black shoe. That is what calls segmentation. I can keep narrowing down every day to just know exactly what you want. Okay, so you cannot give me tailored solutions. That's very, very, very interesting. Although I'm not really caught when white shoes except they are sneakers. That's just on the side. But then again, you also talked about how you can actually leverage on sending several messages all at the time. But let's talk about how you actually would go about starting that because would you need to start gathering several email addresses or just how do you go about? Yeah, so that's the first step, Justin. So the first step is to build your email list and how do you build your email list? It's very simple. People think that that's very hard but it's actually simpler than even coming up with content for your social media posts. And this is how you do it. Just come up with something of value to your potential customer segment. So for example, if you're a coach or an author you can come up with a very small 10-page e-book, maybe an abstract or an excerpt from your book that you want to release in the future or something you've done in the past. And then put it up on a landing page. A landing page is simply a one-page website that you can put in an opt-in form. An opt-in form is just a form where you can receive email addresses. So put a picture of that e-book there. Say download this my free e-book and then when you read that e-book you'll probably learn 10 ways of making money in Nigeria right now or how to spend money without cash in Nigeria currently. That's the title of the e-book. So when people see that e-book they're going to give you their email to download that free content. So that's how it works. So just put up a valuable content and then in exchange for that content let people submit their email to get that content and then that's how you gather and build your email list. And once your email list has reached and grown to about 800 then you are good to start nurturing them. So you start from capturing the leads which is the emails by exchanging something of value for those emails then you start sending emails by nurturing them. Like nurturing means you are sending emails frequently to them to tell them about different things that is of value to them still. You are not selling at that point. Then once they are engaging with you and opening your email and they are now loyal to your email marketing strategy then you can send a final email selling them to buy or to get something or to do something that you want them to really do. All right. So just before we came in our free chat we were talking about how it is you could send the divisive ways you could actually send this email so people could actually get to read them because ordinarily if I open my mailbox and I see messages that are not really from people that I can identify I just delete without even reading. So how can you do that judiciously and make eye-catching captions or emails so people ordinarily would just want to go through them. Fantastic question, Justin. So it's very simple or it's becoming simpler by the day. So before now you have to be an expert in content writing to actually be able to come up with an email marketing content that is actually convincing especially the subject line. Like I said before now that when you go into your inbox you are going to see a lot thousands and thousands of emails that are unsolicited emails that you didn't even subscribe to. But some of them once in a while because of their subject line usually sometimes you just see them how do I get money without going to the ATM. You want to definitely find out about that so you click on that and you read that content. So that is how you come up with CacheCon. Like I said it's now simpler because you no longer have to be a content writer to come up with Cache's subject line and what's the solution or what's the catch there. It's something called artificial intelligence. So there are actually platforms you can go to that you can say okay I want to write a mail about something, something, something I'm writing the mail to my audience about something, a particular topic and the AI will tell you 10 different suggested powerful subject lines you can use that will be guaranteed that they will open. And then it can even go further to open, tell you right for you the content of the email. So you just give it some prompt. So there are different platforms out there like that and Tribe Back is one of them also. Before you start him Tribe Back. It's still a business insight on plus TV Africa and of course we still have Okbe in Manu who is an email marketing specialist, expert if you like we'll take a quick break and there's a whole lot more we still need to talk about if there are do's and don'ts to be observed there. I heard there's some sort of a 5T 8020 we'll be talking about all of that in a moment you just want to hang around for that stay with us. All right welcome back it's still business insight and plus TV Africa I am having a wonderful time I've been receiving useful insight about email marketing I'm sure you also have we still have Okbe in Manu with us and he's been sharing useful tips Iman thanks for staying with us. Thank you Justin. All right before I went on that break I was talking about do's and don'ts you talked about catchy captions are there things to be observed and things that you should do away with when we talk about email marketing? Yeah so yeah so there are do's and don'ts right so there's something called spam emails right so there is a whole lot of algorithm that email engines use to actually fit out what you're going to your inbox what you're going to your promotional box and then maybe your spam box or even not even get to you at all so right so how do you bypass or what do you do to actually get into inbox of people so the first thing is that your content must be personalized right so you don't want to write a mail and then just broadcast it to over a thousand persons you know it doesn't make sense if at once once the Google was the engine the email engine that's what kind of email that is not personalized to the owner of that account is going to just throw it into spam so that's the first rule personalize your emails and now do you personalize your emails make sure that within your email content even inclusive of the subject line include the name of the person in there so you're saying okay so the platform already allow you to do that so it's not like you have to send one by one to all the one thousand email addresses you just type one content the email platforms actually allow you to pull up personalization tags which is the name of each person so once you put tags there when the system is about sending the email to all the thousand persons you're going to replace the names of each individual within that mail to everybody so you just need to send it once but the system is going to replace everybody's name as it's sending to Justin's you're going to see Justin in your mail let's break it down because it sounds so wonderful but then are you saying a thousand people our emails and you have their name so you have to compute all the thousand names as per or how okay so I can just put a pen yeah that was suggested yes yes so don't forget that there was a capturing part okay so when you actually capturing the emails the owner of the emails have supplied his name and his email to download your free email so that name and email is already in the system so now what you need to do is type your subject line include those personalization tags in between where you want the name to show then send the mail then the system now goes into all the one thousand email addresses it knows their name and their email address so it's going to when it's sending to Justin's email address it's going to now insert Justin's name in between you know locations within the mail box and that's what it's going to do for everybody so once your email engine receives that kind of mail it knows that this person knows Justin that's why it's so we're not trading to you that's the first the second reason when you're starting out in your email marketing journey you should ensure that you are not sending too many at once don't send emails every day to people that you don't know so maximum when you're starting out send twice a week if at matter of fact when you're starting out once a week that's another rule so you can go on and go on and on but those two are very important the frequency that works that's something technical that's a test alright I was trying to do some reading concerning email marketing I hear there's a 5T or 80, 20 rule what does that really mean okay so for the 80, 20 rule it simply means that of course generally 80, 20 rule means that you're doing 80% of what you're doing is coming from 20% of it's 20% of what you're doing is coming from 80% of the results right so in the email world it means that when you start sending out your emails to people it means that at the beginning you can actually get about 20% open rate right 20% of your entire email list we actually open your email right but as you now segment down as you keep segmenting down so you send out an email to a thousand email addresses about 20% is very good is that it automatically move those 20% 20% that open the email into a new list that's segmentation so you know you have 80% on opened email addresses or that have not opened your email 20% have now engaged and have opened so the message the message you're going to send out should not be the same for the two groups so you should send a more personalized email to these 20% and then something else to the 80% telling them now so that's how you keep narrowing down until you now have eventually an 80% that is now engaged active loyal wants to read your content you know they are waiting for your mail every time that is where you will get your most results from that you should focus on how soon can you get to that particular status so it depends between one month to three months you can all right still about able market as much as possible try to advise starters and small businesses on this particular show on how they really need to go and how they can scale up their businesses as it is right now still on this particular marketing strategy would you really need some sort of formalized trade and you talked about in catchy captions it's not everyone that is really so savvy to writing or would you need professional help or maybe a professional to be added to your business so like I said I mentioned something before the break that there is now AI artificial intelligence involving email marketing so you don't have to go for any training though you can know the basics like the rules the do's and don'ts and you know frequency and all of that AI might not help you with that but the real core of writing the actual content writer to do that you can delegate that tax to an artificial intelligence you know to out and there are so many of them alright then how do you go about how often do you go about review or evaluation as you send out these emails and you want to know how far they have reached and what impact time they have made how soon should you be talking about evaluation and then maybe analysis on them yeah so almost every other day you should be doing that so if you're also using a very good platform you know like try back you should get a report at the end once you send out an email almost immediately if anybody opens even the next second if anybody opens the system already knows that someone has opened so you as the marketing chief executive or marketing manager or wherever you are you should be looking at a dashboard where you see the report a detailed report of every mail that you sent out and then you should have email marketing not the first mail is how far you can segment that to the real, loyal, active, engaged customer so you want to keep segmenting that so what I'm saying is that you can every 24 hours you should have a dashboard in front of you that shows you your open rate your click rate your people that are unsubscribing people that are bouncing emails that are invalid a whole lot of stuff should be on your dashboard you should be analyzing every 24 hours you should be talking about this is sounding too formal my business has not been scaled up to that level does it really matter about the size of the business the scope of the business or the market segmentation per se that the business are dealing just how whether it really depends on the industry you are in it doesn't really the truth is that once you engage once any customer works into your store even if you are an offline business you are in barbershop or you are a clothes seller fashion designer wherever once a customer engages your business the first time you should get their email because you don't want to spend there is a saying that says that it's always easier to resell to an old customer than to acquire a new one right so you always want to once you have an engaged contact with your customer get their email address because you can always re-engage them you can always sell to them you can always sell to them through email marketing so irrespective of the size of your business or whatever industry you are in or whether you are an SME a big business enterprise whatever size of your business you should be capturing emails and you should be using that because you don't want to be spending so much money on social media ads when you now really want to increase the visibility of your business you don't want to be spending so much money on affiliate marketing or you want to be doing something that is cheaper and is direct so once someone walks into your store as a barber I tell you if you understand the parking marketing you should have a form somewhere in front of you at the front of your barber shop saying please drop your email address if you drop your email address we give you 10% discount on your next cut so that you can understand maybe you're growing bigger you have the email addresses you can just send them an email inform them that you've changed addresses then maybe you have a promo coming or maybe Valentine that happened yesterday for example you want to give every you know a salon I want to give every lady in town a subsidized styling for their Valentine because I was going to ask you on an emotional basis or maybe just to just keep tabs with your customers or to tell them about trends or just how I just need to know yeah so there are different types of emails that you can send there are promotional mails there are informational mails there is newsletter just a regular information updates so there are sometimes you just want to give value so you actually would need a strategy yes you need definitely you need a marketing strategy so like I said it starts with capturing the emails the strategy starts with capturing the emails they're not showing them not showing means that you want to have a period where you're actually giving them value so that they capture people's email like I was giving an instance of the barber shop collect their email addresses but be sending them emails about this next trending style that a guy can make that every lady in town will follow him you know send emails about how to maintain maybe your whatever grooming and tips and all that so as they see that you're giving them value you actually they're becoming as you go they'll stop and buy maybe a new clip selling to customers or it has something value to them I want them to buy once you've not shown them for a while then they will be open to clicking or taking the action excuse me they'll be open to taking the action the the business owner really wants them at the end of the day so that's how you work so you capture as such, we could actually go on and on about how far you can go and how much you can benefit from this particular strategy of marketing strategy. But time is never all is our friend when we are having fun as it is. We want to say a very big thank you to you for joining us on Business Insights for this week. Thanks for having me, Justin. It is indeed our pleasure. And that's the size of the show for this week. I am Justin at Cadone. Many thanks for watching Business Insights Returns. Same time next week. Bye for now.