What to consider when choosing an email marketing tool for your business in Uganda
- agnes2718
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
In Uganda, email marketing is largely used by online shopping apps, banks, businesses and professional coaches, recruiting agencies among others, both promotional and transactional emails.
Promotional emails provide special offers, incentives and packages to increase a company's sales and profitability whereas transactional emails are automated emails sent to a single recipient in response to a specific action taken, such as making a purchase, signing up for an account, request for OTP or password reset among others.
Email marketing is one very effective form of digital marketing that involves sending out emails to potential visitors with the intention of turning them into paying customers.
It is a great way to keep in touch with one-time customers reminding them about your business and what you offer.
But why choose email marketing for a Ugandan business?
To improve sales - valuable and enticing content will push this intent.
To easily and visually communicate with your customers - emails always reach the user and thus cannot be easily ignored. Also, emails are viewed as a reliable source of communication.
It helps generate traffic to your website especially after they have clicked through to the available links.
It helps deliver more value to your audience - information like blog posts that could have been missed on the website could easily be available in the email sent.
So, how do you use email marketing in Uganda?
All you have to do is
subscribe to an email automation platform or tool
create and maintain an email list (some platforms like Trembi generate leads for you to add to your email list)
craft emails and send them out to your lists.
But before subscribing to an email marketing tool, there are some factors you have to consider, and this guide outlines these factors to ease the burden of choosing the right tool that fits your business needs.
KEY FACTORS TO CONSIDER
Deliverability
It is easy to craft beautiful and well - thought out email but if they do not to the intended audience, it becomes pointless.
Spam filters or poor set up often inhibits emails from reaching the inbox.
Your tool of choice should support
SPF, DKIM and DMARK Authentication
Spam testing to ensure % deliverability
It is wise to choose a tool with strong deliverability support and guidance to help you achieve maximum efficiency for your campaigns.
Automation capabilities
It's not humanly possible to send out over 1,000 emails in scope of 30 minutes but automated tools are able to do in even less than 30 minutes.
Save time and increase results by choosing a platform that will automate your email marketing campaigns to reach the intended audience within the shortest time possible.
Your tool of choice should support
Welcome series for new subscribers
Abandoned cart reminders
Behavior - based triggers
Scheduling of emails to be sent out at your time of choice depending on the time zone of your clients, if they are international.
Choose automation to help you engage your customers with no need for manual intervention.
Pricing and affordability
Ugandan business especially SMEs are very price sensitive, it is advisable to look out for tools that
have flexible pricing plans that fit within your budget
pay-as-you-grow options to allow you pay only for what you intend to use.
A cheaper tool that works locally and understands the way Africans do business is always better than an expensive global tool even when it promises better features.
Analytics and reporting
For you to be able to measure performance, you need to have insights that will help you understand the campaign metrics like
Open rates
Click through rates
Unsubscribes
Conversion rates
Bounce rates
All these will help you improve your ongoing campaigns and strategize better for future campaigns.
Mobile Optimization
This is very critical in Uganda where a huge percentage of users access their email on mobile phones.
Your tool of choice should
Offer mobile friendly templates so that your emails are viewed as they were intended to be viewed with no alterations.
preview emails on different devices to see if the outcome is the same for all devices.
load fast on low bandwidth to be sure that the intended message is received by all recipients.
It is the practical reality in Uganda if you're brand has to be as visible as it could possibly be.
List segmentation
To be able to resonate with your audience, there is need to segment them according to behavior, location or even language to get great benefits out of your campaigns.
With segmentation, you are able to personalize your emails to move the audience into making purchases.
Multi-channel communication
In Uganda opening, especially promotional emails is not customary, it is important to unify this channel with other channels like SMS and WhatsApp to widen your client reach. The client you won't get on email, you will get on WhatsApp.
Many platforms, especially Trembi, combine the three channels to push a result-oriented campaign.
Ease of use and support
SMEs and growing companies do not have technical support, the easier it is to comprehend the tool, the better. It is a unique selling point for any platform.
The platform should be able to offer
onboarding tutorials and educational material to help you get well acquainted with the platform and also easily navigate it.
Responsive customer support to cater to any technicalities that may occur and enable you to maintain your targets for the campaign.
Local support helps you run a seamless campaign with no glitches and frustration.
Scalability
Your tool of choice should be able to grow with you as your list grows from 100 to 1,000 and many more.
It's important to look out for their initial tier pricing to determine if it is a tool that you are able to use in the longrun.
Integration with other business tools
Online businesses should look out for platfroms that easily integrate with shopping apps like Shopify, Woo Commerce to facilitate the nature of their business
CRM integration is a must to enable the businesses easily manage their list in one centralized place.
Some of the email marketing tools available for Ugandan business
Trembi is an end-to-end sales and marketing tool built to help business find, engage, close and retain customers, all in one place.
Email marketing features:
It supports multi-channel communication, that is SMS, Email and WhatsApp
It is built for the local market meaning better understanding of customer behavior, relevant features and practical pricing.
It has a powerful automation that lets you send and schedule emails automatically based on user actions.
It enables easy campaign creation and fast campaigns for campaigns with no need for a technical team.
It enables you track email opens, clicks and engagement in real time.
It has an in-built CRM that centralizes customer data, helps track leads and automatically follow up (lead nurturing)
Added advantage
Lead generation (customer finding) to help you grow your lists and ultimate sales.
Mail chimp has a full suite of marketing tools including email campaigns, automations and analytics.
Email marketing features
It is easy to use especially if you are new to email marketing
It supports email campaigns, landing pages, forms, basic CRM and analytics for lead management
It supports powerful automations and list segmentation.
It has a free plan for small businesses
Tips on how to grow your email lists in Uganda
Utilize lead generation tools like Trembi that will find customers for you
Craft good, high-quality content
Your emails must have Call to Action (CTA) buttons that will increase your chances at selling. There are power words like 'Free', 'Now', Exclusive to lure your audience into action.
Optimize your email for mobile viewing to favor Ugandans who use their mobile devices for all functions.
Ask subscribers to share your email to their networks. Your emails should always have a 'subscribe' button for new audiences.
In conclusion:
In Uganda where platforms like social media and unstable and often unreliable, leveraging email marketing to grow your sales can bring you paying customers where other sources of traffic have failed.
Choosing the right platform that fits your business needs and budget can elevate your campaigns leading to instant business growth.
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