In 2020, the global number of email users reached four billion, and this figure is projected to increase to 4.6 billion by 2025.
Email marketing provides business owners with a direct and personal means of communication with their customers, enabling them to reach both new and loyal customers effectively.
The advantages of email marketing are plentiful. For a small business, marketing emails can play a crucial role in establishing brand awareness, fostering customer loyalty, and driving sales.
What’s even more impressive is the remarkably high return on investment (ROI) associated with email marketing. A well-executed email campaign can generate over $30 for every dollar spent.
In this article, we will delve into the benefits of email marketing and guide you on how to leverage email communication to unlock the full potential of your small business.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a marketing strategy that involves sending emails to your target audience.
According to a survey, 47% of marketers consider email their most effective marketing channel, with social media marketing (39%), SEO (33%), and content marketing (33%), following closely behind.
Hence, it’s one of the best ways to turn prospects into buyers and one-off customers into engaged and loyal customers.
Your email marketing strategy can encompass sending weekly newsletters, promotional emails, and special deals to customers. It allows you to create a relationship with your audience and steadily build loyalty to your brand.
What Are The Benefits Of Email Marketing For Small Businesses?
For small businesses that don’t have sizable marketing budgets, email marketing can drive impressive results.
Email marketing is a marketing strategy that involves sending emails to your target audience. It’s one of the best ways to turn prospects into buyers and one-off customers into engaged and loyal customers.
Your email marketing strategy can encompass sending weekly newsletters, promotional emails, and special deals to customers. It allows you to create a relationship with your audience and steadily build loyalty to your brand.
For small businesses that don’t have sizable marketing budgets, email marketing can drive impressive results.
Below are 15 of the biggest benefits of email marketing for small businesses.
1. Offers Personalization To Customers
Every buyer has unique needs and preferences. Once you identify your target audience, buyer personas, and what interests them, it is crucial to send them personalized messages that will truly delight them.
By gathering accurate data, a small business can send targeted messages to its buyers at the most opportune moments. This increases the likelihood of converting them into customers that align with their specific preferences and requirements.
However, simply personalizing, which means including the recipient’s name in the subject line and email copy, won’t be enough in 2023.
Today’s consumers seek hyper-personalized content that provides them with relevant information and feels tailor-made for their unique needs.
Thankfully, you can begin delivering hyper-personalized content by utilizing segmentation and dynamic content.
Email list segmentation involves grouping email subscribers into smaller segments based on specific criteria.
This could include factors such as location, purchase history, interests, and behavior. It saves the effort of delivering the same generic message to everyone.
This process becomes much simpler when using email marketing software or services that allow for the implementation of dynamic content. Dynamic email content refers to any personalized component of a marketing email that adjusts based on your email list segments.
2. Reaches Interested Audiences
Your target audience won’t subscribe to your email marketing strategies if they do not like or aren’t familiar with your small business.
This implies that when you send emails, you are reaching out to individuals who have willingly agreed to receive communications from your business.
Once someone subscribes to your emails, the objective is to retain their interest and prevent them from unsubscribing.
To achieve this, it is important to establish clear expectations regarding the content of your emails. Consistently deliver content that aligns with those expectations, ensuring that subscribers receive what they signed up for.
3. Targeted Email Campaigns Drive Sales
Email marketing is one of the best ways to grow your sales, especially if traffic to your brick-and-mortar store is down significantly.
Some customers will make a buying decision if they receive a well-timed offer.
However, it is important to encourage customers to take the desired action of making a purchase.
For instance, if you have an email campaign specifically tailored to your VIP customers, you can customize your website to consistently highlight your offer across various pages, not just the email itself.
If you aim to boost your sales, one effective approach is to create marketing campaigns that feature discounts, offers, and deals. 63% of the customers indicate that they open emails specifically to find discounts.
This proven method can yield significant benefits for your small business in the long term.
Additionally, there is a particular type of email known as the “abandoned cart email” that can be quite useful. These emails allow you to reach out to email subscribers who have recently added items to their shopping cart but haven’t completed the purchase, serving as a reminder for them to finalize their transaction.
The general principle is that the greater the interaction between your customers and your website, the greater the likelihood of conversion.
Therefore, it is crucial to establish a smart connection between your email channel and website to maximize these advantages.
4. Saves Time And Money
Most small business owners are short on time and money, and email marketing is easy to automate and cost-effective.
When you set up a new email campaign, once you set up your list, determine your offer, and design your email, it automatically sends it to your target list.
Engage with your audience and create new customers even while you’re working on other aspects of running your business.
Of course, tracking email marketing campaigns is important, and tweak things from time to time, but email marketing is one of the most hands-off marketing strategies there is.
It’s also relatively inexpensive, especially when compared to other methods, like paid advertising. You can develop a professional email campaign that goes to thousands of subscribers for very little money.
5. Builds Excitement Around Your Services
One of the often underestimated advantages of email marketing is its ability to generate excitement around new products and services.
Businesses can encourage customers to sign up for exclusive content or gain early access to product releases.
After all, there’s nothing worse than a product or service launch that falls short of expectations. With countless hours invested by various team members, from product designers to marketers, it’s crucial to ensure that your product launches make a significant impact.
With a reliable email service provider, you can track the responses to these marketing emails, gaining valuable insights into customer preferences and enabling retargeting efforts as new products and services become available.
Email marketing serves as a powerful tool to generate buzz and anticipation for the next exciting developments in your business.
6. It’s Owned Media
Owned media simply means digital marketing channels that a business has complete control over, such as its website.
This is exactly what sets email apart as a channel, as websites have control over each email marketing campaign sent out. Unlike other channels, there are no limitations on content.
For instance, social media platforms rely on third-party platforms to disseminate messages. While this can be advantageous, the drawback is that platforms like Facebook can easily change their advertising policies, ban accounts, or even cease operations altogether.
Email marketing provides a valuable means to build owned media, allowing businesses to establish direct connections with their target audience without relying solely on third-party platforms.
7. Stronger Relationships With Customers
Marketing involves demonstrating value to consumers and showing them how they can take the next step with your business. Once someone joins your email list, you have the opportunity to send them useful, relevant content.
Every email you send to your customers shouldn’t involve selling them your products or services. You should provide value in your emails.
When you can demonstrate to your customers the value you provide to them, they’ll look forward to hearing from you.
It can be information that you think they’ll find helpful. For example, you can create an email that links to a recent blog post you wrote.
In your emails, list your social media accounts and encourage subscribers to connect with you on those channels.
Doing this helps build your credibility with your audience, and if they are intrigued by a particular email you’ve sent, they can easily learn more about your products or services by clicking on your social media links.
8. A Strong Following of Subscribers
One of the downsides of social media marketing is that you don’t own your followers. If your Facebook Business page is unexpectedly shut down (which isn’t uncommon), you’ll lose access to the following you’ve spent months or even years building.
That’s why it’s important to build an email list. You have a valuable list of customers and a way to contact those customers. Even if you switch email providers, you own the list of your contacts.
9. Nurtures Leads
Email marketing enables you to nurture leads effectively. When someone completes an email form on your website, you can utilize automation to send them targeted emails that guide them through the buying funnel.
With a suitable email marketing platform, you can customize your email campaigns based on a person’s interactions with your website.
By employing tailored content for each stage of the customer journey, you can engage individuals who have just discovered your business, those who are researching their options, and even those who are ready to make a purchase.
10. Easily Measurable
Most email marketing platforms provide built-in analytics that offers valuable insights into your campaign’s performance.
Although each platform may have slight variations, they typically allow you to track essential information to evaluate the success of your campaign.
You can access data such as email open rates, click-through rates, bounced emails, unsubscribes, and recipient demographics, providing you with a comprehensive view of how your emails are performing and how users are engaging with them.
11. Improves Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Word-of-mouth marketing has demonstrated its effectiveness for businesses of all sizes, and emails can facilitate this form of marketing effortlessly, especially for small businesses.
Subscribers have the convenience of easily forwarding your emails to their loved ones or encouraging them to subscribe to your newsletter if they find it valuable.
To expedite this process, you can implement a referral marketing campaign featuring a dedicated “Refer a Friend” call-to-action button. Offering customers a monetary incentive or a gift for successful referrals adds an intriguing element.
Furthermore, if you wish to include this initiative in other emails, you can place it as a link in the email footer alongside essential elements like the “Unsubscribe” or “Manage Preferences” buttons.
12. Offers the Possibility of Automation
Around 51% of businesses utilize automation to enhance their marketing processes.
Email automation not only saves you significant time and effort but also catalyzes business growth.
By automating campaigns such as transactional or welcome emails, you can reach out to subscribers at the right times, increasing the chances of conversion.
For instance, you can set up welcome email sequences for new customers or trigger messages based on specific actions, such as a purchase, to notify readers that their action is complete and instill trust.
Alternatively, you can schedule drip campaigns (series of automated messages sent to subscribers) and select precise dates and times to send those emails.
13. Enables Measuring Campaign Success
Conducting A/B tests for emails is a valuable technique to determine what resonates best with your audience and optimize the performance of your email campaigns.
By creating different variations of elements, and analyzing the results, you can identify which variation performs better.
This data-driven approach allows you to send the winning variation to the remaining email list, maximizing engagement and conversions.
A/B tests allow your small business to make informed decisions and continuously enhance the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
14. Offers Insights Into Your Audience
Data plays a crucial role. It is vital to track email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, so you can understand which content and messaging resonate most with your audience.
Moreover, you can gather data through sign-up forms and social media links in your emails, providing insights into your subscribers’ demographics, preferences, and behaviors.
Here are some key metrics to monitor:
- Open rate: The number of people who opened your email
- Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of readers who clicked on links in your email
- Conversion rate: The proportion of subscribers who completed the desired action, such as a purchase
- Bounce rate: The number of email addresses that did not receive your campaign.
Utilizing this information, you can segment your email list and deliver personalized and relevant content to your audience.
15. Improves Content Marketing
If you have a blog or other content marketing resources, using your email channel to promote them is highly recommended.
Whether it’s thought leadership articles, product descriptions, or infographics, these resources offer numerous advantages when effectively distributed through email.
Firstly, this strategy can attract new visitors to your website and bolster your efforts to drive traffic and generate leads. Additionally, it educates your customers and prospects about your niche market, products, and services, adding value to your interactions.
Bonus:
16. Works Well With SEO
While it may not be immediately evident, SEO and email marketing benefit each other in digital marketing.
Backlinks from reputable external websites to your website can have a positive impact on your SEO. This indicates to search engines that your website is trustworthy.
By incorporating content from your website into your emails, you enhance the chances of recipients linking to your content when they come across your emails.
Conclusion
Email marketing campaigns offer a plethora of benefits for businesses seeking to connect with their audience, drive sales, and enhance brand awareness.
From personalized content creation to generating leads, improving sales, and saving time, email marketing is a versatile and cost-effective tool that can propel your business toward success in the digital landscape.
By leveraging the power of email marketing campaigns, businesses can foster stronger relationships with their audience, increase conversions, and achieve sustainable growth in today’s competitive market.
