There are a lot of different marketing options out there but email marketing should be at the top of your Marketing list. It’s effective, affordable and it guarantees that your message is showing up in your customers’ inboxes.  And you can track virtually every aspect of its performance - how many receive, how many open, how many click through and how many take actions on your site from the email. Priceless!

 As for how effective email is, the stats show:

• Customers who purchase through email spend an average of 138% more than those who didn’t convert through email.

• 80% of retail professional say that email marketing is their biggest driver in customer retention.

• For every $1 you spend on email marketing, there’s an average return of $44!!! (yes 44:1) 

• Klaviyo (I love)  and MailChimp (I like) are both easy to use, flexible and offer a ton of sale-enhancing capabilities with minimal incremental investment.

Here are some of the most frequent questions I get and helpful tips for bringing your brand to life and growing your sales through email marketing.

Part of Amazon's success is driven by more than 300,000 US-based small- and medium-sized businesses that sell through Amazon's Marketplace as a third party, listing and selling products there with the option of using Amazon's powerful logistics capability to fulfill customer orders.  

But is Amazon really a good partner for small- and medium-sized businesses?  Ultimately, it's not a simple yes or no answer. There are major benefits of working with Amazon Marketplace and there are also drawbacks.  

Ultimately, working with local or larger regional and national stores can expose your brand to a far larger audience, enable selling in larger orders and help customers experience your brand easily. The key is preparation so here are 5 tips for get your brand into retail.

The key is to focus your marketing efforts where they can make the biggest impact -- the digital space. While it may not be feasible to try to compete in every aspect of the digital marketing, there are important areas where a small business can still gain an advantage over its larger competitors.