You will be able to describe what email, paid ads and partnerships each do well and what each costs in time and money.
Mei Ling, the home baker in Punggol from lesson 1.2, has an example budget of S$300 and about five spare hours a month to put into finding and keeping customers. A friend tells her email is old-fashioned. Another says she should run ads. A third suggests teaming up with the enrichment centre downstairs. All three ideas are sensible, and she can't afford to do all of them.
Lesson 5.2 compared search and social. This lesson covers the other three channels most small businesses weigh up: email, paid ads and partnerships. Each one is good at a different job, and each one costs something different.
Email reaches people who gave you their address and agreed to hear from you. That permission is what makes it different. The person on your list has already met you, often already bought from you, and chose to stay in touch. So email is strongest at the later stages of the journey: bringing past customers back, telling regulars about something new, and reminding people at the moment they are likely to buy again.
For Mei Ling, that could be a short message in the second week of each month listing the dates still open for custom cakes, sent to everyone who ordered in the past year. A parent who ordered for a son's birthday in March has another child with a birthday in August. The email reaches her before she starts searching.
In Singapore the same idea often runs through a WhatsApp broadcast list instead of email, and the logic is the same: you message people who opted in.
The cost is mostly time. An email tool costs little or nothing for a small list. Writing something worth reading once or twice a month might take two to four hours. The list itself takes longest, because you build it one customer at a time.
Permission is more than good manners here. The Personal Data Protection Act, or PDPA, sets rules on collecting and using people's personal data, and an email address or phone number counts. In general, you need their consent to use it for marketing, and you should tell them what you'll use it for when you collect it.
The Do Not Call rules under the PDPA cover a narrower area: marketing calls and text messages sent to Singapore phone numbers. Before you send that kind of message, you either check the number against the Do Not Call Registry or hold clear consent from the person. Bulk commercial email is covered by a separate law, the Spam Control Act, which among other things requires an easy way to unsubscribe.
Rules change and the details matter, so check the current guidance on the Personal Data Protection Commission's website before you send your first campaign, especially for WhatsApp broadcasts. The simplest safe habit is to ask clearly when you collect a contact, keep a record that they said yes, and make leaving the list easy.
Paid ads put your message in front of people who don't know you yet. You choose the audience, the message and the budget, and the ads can be running by this afternoon, which no other channel here can match.
The second strength is less obvious. Ads let you test. Suppose Mei Ling isn't sure whether parents care more about "cakes that look like the photo" or "delivered to your door on the day". She can run two versions of the same ad, each with S$50 of her example budget, and see which one brings more enquiries. That answer is useful well beyond the ads. It tells her what to say on her order page, in her captions and in her replies.
The weakness is that reach stops the moment you stop paying. An ad builds nothing that stays, except what you learn and any customers who join your list. Ads also cost time, because someone has to set them up, check them every week and change what isn't working. Budget at least an hour or two a week even for a small campaign. The sibling course Paid ads: Meta, Google and TikTok teaches how to run them.
A partnership puts your business in front of an audience that already trusts someone else. A school, a residents' committee, a parents' group, a gym, a shop next door. When the enrichment centre downstairs recommends Mei Ling's cakes to parents planning a class party, those parents arrive already half convinced, because the recommendation came from someone they know.
Good partnerships share a customer without competing for the same spending. A tuition centre and a bookshop both serve parents of primary school children. A wedding photographer and a florist serve the same couples. The deal can be simple: a referral discount both ways, a joint event, a leaflet at each other's counter.
Partnerships cost little money but a lot of patience. You have to find the right partner, agree terms, and keep the arrangement alive after the first month. They also depend on the partner's reputation. If they let customers down, some of that sticks to you.
Here is how Mei Ling's example sums came out when she wrote them down:
Email: a monthly message to past customers, about three hours a month and close to S$0. Ads: a small test of two messages, about S$100 a month and two hours a week while it runs. Partnerships: one arrangement with the enrichment centre, about four hours to set up and an hour a month after that.
None of these is the right answer for everyone. Laid out like this, though, the trade-offs are plain. She has the hours for email and one partnership. The ads would take most of her money and more time than she has spare.
In the activity below you will write the same three lines for your business. Use real hours from your own week, and put a dollar figure on each one even if it is a guess.
For each of email, ads and partnerships, write one way your business could use it and the weekly hours or monthly dollars it would take.
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