Key findings from a recent January 09,  HubSpot survey on Inbound Marketing found Small businesses are most aggressively allocating lead generation budgets to blogging, social media and search engine optimization.

“Realizing that inbound marketing techniques ‘level the playing field’ with the bigger budgets of larger competitors, small businesses are spending a 180% greater portion of their budgets on blogging/social media and 36% greater portion of their budgets on search engine optimization than businesses with 50 employees or more.”

Online techniques allow for cost efficiencies to compete against much larger marketing budgets. But why?

“Outbound marketing customer acquisition depends largely on the size of a company’s budget, whereas inbound marketing more heavily slants towards those businesses with the best products and services and ability to create great content.”

In the HubSpot survey they found, small businesses reported spending nearly 3X higher percentage of their lead generation budget on blogs and social media than medium-to-large businesses (14% and 5%, respectively).

On the lead generation side, small businesses spending more than 50% on inbound marketing reported a lower cost per lead, compared with medium and larger business.

What does this tell us?

If you haven’t already allocated budgets to online lead generation campaigns it is not too late to take advantage.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Using Online Video for Marketing
• Customer Acquisition – Hunting or Harvesting Leads
• Content Marketing is key for Small Business in 2010
• How to collect email addresses on your Facebook Page
• Should a New Business start Marketing?

Question: Do you currently send a confirmation email message to new email subscribers?

Return Path an industry leader in the email marketing space, released a June 2008 study revealing that an alarming 60% of marketers surveyed don’t send welcome e-mails to new subscribers.  For newsletter type and customer list email marketers it is important to start off on the right foot with first impressions. Subscribing to your mailing list starts a new relationship with your company and your brand. You want to make sure that the first experience with your company is a positive one.

So if you are convinced that you need to send welcome emails to new subscribers, what do you include in this first communication?

New subscribers might also be interested in:

1. Knowing their subscription request was received and processed correctly.
2. The frequency of your communications; daily/weekly/monthly
3. Archived versions of your newsletters to judge for themselves if the information is relevant and they wish to continue receiving more information.
4. Perhaps a link to your privacy policy
   A privacy policy will indicated how the opt-in email address will be used or possibly shared with third parties if at all.

Interested in more ideas for increasing email marketing relevance?
Read more at DM News, Tools you can use to your e-mail marketing advantage

Possibly Related Posts:

• Email Marketing Effectiveness is Still Strong
• Best way of using Links in Emails
• Small Businesses still prefer Vendor supplied Business Advice
• Higher Growth Businesses Spend More on Marketing and Shift Marketing Online