Top 21+ Benefits of Email Marketing for Small Business Owners
Email is now a standard form of communication for many people, including corporate bodies and small businesses alike businesses.
Many people regularly check their inboxes for new emails at intervals whether that’s at home or in the office.
A study from Adobe further estimated that people spend about 6.4 hours a day reading through their emails.
With that figure, it’s important to key into emails as a dependable marketing avenue. It can be a solid link between your business and customers.
Spending money to gain ground in business is a must. But the great part about email marketing is that it’s a cost-effective way of connecting to your customers at their preferred meeting point – their inbox.
Since you also get new customers to grow your business, email marketing presents a smart solution that helps you retain them over time. Thankfully, you’re never without your list for the rest of your life.
There’s more to email marketing that you’ll get to know via the benefits you’re about to read. Enjoy!
Why Email Marketing Works
Email marketing is one of the easiest and most effective ways you can use to let your customers know that you value them.
In the same vein, it is one of the few online marketing channels that allow businesses to maintain close and personal contact with their customers regularly.
Contact is everything and even simple phrases like “We are glad to have you onboard,” or something like “you’ve waited long for this product, now it’s here”, can build excitement in a fun way.
It’s all geared towards building a lasting relationship with your customers.
Email marketing works because you value your audience in your conversations with them.
In line with that, they’re more likely to engage in your Call to Actions(CTA) or links as the case may be.
The Top Benefits Of Email Marketing
1) Business Credibility
Credibility is often underrated. Perhaps big businesses don’t need it so much, however, they labored to get there.
On the other hand, small businesses have a long way to go in brand building.
Many subscribers will delete emails they receive from suspicious personalities. They prefer to respond to someone they’ve built a lot of trust with.
With email marketing, it’s easier because it is essentially about permission-based marketing.
When you have their attention and can message them, it’s up to you to prove how credible your business is.
When you get that chance, don’t hesitate to provide content they can relate to.
Be Authentic
Your email is the chance to show who you are as a brand, so don’t underestimate your ability to be head and shoulders above the rest.
To build your reputation as a credible source, you have to remain accountable and true to your brand.
As such, being authentic with your audience includes getting a unique brand voice – one that’s different from the rest.
One way to do that is to avoid using cookie-cutter content in your emails, and instead, focus on using your personality to create content that draws in your customers.
You can use this as an opportunity to showcase what makes your brand so special and at the same time, give your subscribers the content they want from you.
2) Improves your Brand Recognition
Brand recognition is very important. In fact, it’s one of the most crucial benefits of all email marketing. With the right service, you’ll get the right publicity.
Email marketing also gives you a direct means to your subscriber’s inbox. The content you personalize and create for them gives you an edge over your competitors.
Your efforts with email also gives you the opportunity to get feedback from your subscribers.
What they can help you with includes pointers to the following:
- Questions on whether customers are happy with the content you provide.
- Whether they prefer to learn something different
- Is the content you provide engaging enough?
These aspects will help to improve any existing marketing strategy and help you grow your brand.
Don’t shy away from discussions with your customers in your bid to drive your brand forward.
3) Optimize your Budget
Optimizing your budget is probably great for your growth. The fact is you have a lot of things to pay for. Designing, printing, mailing services, etc. have to be paid for.
As with the time and money saved, designing and other perks of email marketing aren’t as complex.
Overall, it’s relatively inexpensive when you compare it to some other means of marketing like print media, and direct mail. What you want is money earned, not money lost.
4) Easy to Begin
Another advantage email marketing holds over others is that you can begin without hassles.
There are so many templates and styles to choose from. Also, the tools at your disposal mean you can easily set up your first campaign within seconds.
For example, you can get an email service that comes with a guide and various pre-installed steps to help you get up and running.
5) There are no Character Limits!
While social media platforms like Twitter as well as PPC ads limit the number of characters you are allowed to use, there are no character limits for emails.
As such, your brand messaging can contain a great deal of content.
However, it doesn’t mean that you should go all berserk sending textbook-length emails to customers and leads.
What you should do is take advantage of the opportunity to present a longer and more detailed content or message where necessary.
The goal and purpose of your email when crafting content should be at the forefront of your mind.
Remember, you have a bit more spade than other marketing channels might allow.
Start with the subject line
Choose your words wisely. You have a wide arena to work with but an attention-grabbing subject line often suffices.
It represents the only chance you have to hook your subscriber into opening your email.
Add a bit of personalization, create a sense of urgency, and thank your subscribers.
Subject lines represent value because they are also a great and easy way to start A/B testing your content.
Go ahead to try out different sentences to see which versions attract your specific audience more.
6) Increase your Abandoned cart Conversions
Abandoned carts happen when buyers visit your website, place products in their carts, and leave without completing a purchase on them.
Sometimes the buyer may be busy with something else at a particular moment. Other times, they just want to take their time before following through.
You can always re-engage your customers especially to learn why they’re not making purchases.
You can use automated messages and quality content to draw them back to your website to complete a few orders.
7) Targeted and Personalized Messages
Email marketing allows you to personalize your messages, contents, and offerings so that you can reach a target audience at the right moment.
The best way to achieve this is by dividing your email list into groups following their needs and preferences.
That way, you have an easier task to send personalized content to your customers.
Your subscribers will be happy to receive mails suited to their personalities.
8) It fits Easily into other Marketing Channels
Email marketing is one of those marketing channels that easily integrates with the others in the digital marketing range.
It’s that flexible and complements the others very well.
A good example is making use of email marketing to promote a social media contest and boost several of your social media posts.
As a result, you’ll be doing your bit to generate more traffic to your site.
9) Boosts your Sales
It’s easier to pull customers to buy your goods with email marketing. There are ways to help you do that including:
- Displaying additional products that are often purchased by other customers with recently purchased items.
- Display a list of similar products to the customer’s past purchases or search.
The thing is customers are more likely to respond positively when they get a newsletter or an email describing an important product similar to their previous purchases.
10) Increased Traffic to your Website
It’s natural for many businesses to include their website blog links in outbound emails.
As such, they get to increase the number of people that visit their sites.
If you’re not already doing this, you have to. It’s highly beneficial especially when you have a great email campaign.
With that, you can easily attract subscribers to interact with the content (blog posts, articles) placed on your site.
In case you include a CTA in your emails, you can include a colorful button to represent it.
That way, those who view your email can see it and find their way back to your site.
You can go a step further by including social media sharing buttons in any email you send.
Perhaps your subscribers will be motivated enough to share them on their social media profiles.
11) Stronger Customer Relationship
Whether they say it or not, subscribers and customers always appreciate good messages, one specially crafted with them in mind.
Email marketing is the connection in vogue and, serves as a bridge between you and your subscribers.
Getting started with a drip campaign can help the process.
Drip campaigns are automated email campaigns that involve gradually sending emails to potential buyers concerning a product, piece of important information, or service.
Remember those emails you receive from shopping sites like eBay, even when you haven’t purchased anything. Those are examples of drip marketing.
So, as you build a stronger relationship with your customers, you can discuss a wide range of issues with them, including how to serve them better.
12) Real-time Interaction with your Customers
Email marketing is one of the perfect channels for sending timely messages to your email subscribers.
Through that, you promote healthy communication with your customers and leads in real-time.
Unlike other marketing channels like billboards and print, email marketing is not static.
The others mentioned also have a very low rate of feedback.
13) Establish Authority
Your content, even those contained in your emails, are some of the most valuable marketing tools that you can use to build other areas of your marketing strategy.
It doesn’t take a magician to figure that when your subscribers love what they see, they’ll want to see more from you.
What you can do is produce similar content every time in order to establish your position among your competitors.
That will go far to prove you’re an authority in your chosen industry. It will also help you have an upsurge in subscribers.
14) Learn what Works
Learning what works simply means that you can study and monitor the number of people who are opening, reading, and clicking through your links, contents, and emails.
For example, a good open rate means your business is getting popular and gaining the trust of your target audience.
Further, the Click-through-rate (CTR) represents another viable metric that gives you an idea of the number of subscribers that open the links in your emails. The normal rate across many industries is 7%.
Making modifications to your content and checking out the success of your marketing strategy will tell you what works best for your business.
15) Create some Excitement
Make use of your email marketing campaign to create an air of excitement.
That means delivering messages to your customers that show a special product is or event is on the way.
It could also be an oncoming contest or loyalty reward.
Whatever it is, it should be worth getting across to those who matter – your customers.
As a small business, it’s never a bad idea to reward those who keep your business going.
It’s never late to build up some excitement around your business and customers.
16) Optimize your Contents Easily
There are a host of factors that can help you optimize your content easily. They include:
- Demographic
- Segmenting
- Targeting, and
- Testing
These help you develop an effective strategy for connecting to your audience.
What it takes is discovering the right content for your messages to help you drive up conversions and purchases.
Avoid the spam filter
There are two quickest ways to end up in the spam folder of someone’s inbox – by being deceptive or delivering irrelevant content.
You want to be authentic so it’s best you do the following:
- Never use false headers, names, and subject lines.
- Include your physical mailing address
17) Variety
They say variety is the spice of life. Well, email marketing provides just that, including a more versatile marketing channel for communicating with your customers.
To that end, you can send videos, attachments, audio content, links, and much more to your subscribers outside of the normal texts and images that make up a large part of other marketing channels.
18) Stay top of Subscribers’ Minds
You can communicate easily and frequently with your subscribers through email marketing.
Stay top of their minds with new conversations, and period reminders of the value your business can bring to the table.
This is one activity you have to perform so that you can build and sustain a successful business.
It’s also a great way to keep in touch with your current customers while doing your bit to lure potential customers.
19) Contents on Email Marketing are Shareable
Including social media and email share buttons in your email messages is a game-changer.
They allow viewers to read your content easily, and to quickly share their favorite email contents with their family and friends.
Some of them will even seek out ways to add their contacts to your mailing list.
What you get is an increase in traffic and the room to get new potential customers to your business.
20) Permission-based Service
Stats show that 77% of people prefer to get permission-based promotional messages via messaging mediums including emails.
What you get is a marketing list that will be made up of people who have actively decided to receive email communications from you.
That shows they’re genuinely interested in your products and services, and will probably go on to engage with your business.
21) Flexible and Scalable Design
With email marketing, it’s possible to send plain text, graphics, or attach files – whichever suits your message best.
A choice of design options will also give you the scope to convey your business branding.
As for being scalable, email marketing can be used to reach large audiences or even smaller targeted lists. It all depends on what you want.
22) Benchmark
Email is one service that can help your brand compare results against others in your industry.
To that end, there are many free email marketing benchmarking reports available. You can find them online.
Besides that, benchmarking data can help you to evaluate and prioritize improvement opportunities.
According to 254 SBM Retail Professionals on the best digital tactics that drive customer acquisition, 81% of respondents see email marketing as the best for acquisition.
On the other hand, another 80% reported email marketing as best for customer retention.
23) Less Intrusive Style
There are many marketing strategies out there that scare off potential customers.
You can put that down to how intrusive they are. The fact is people love their privacy.
For example, in telephone marketing, there’s no permission-first option. You can receive cold calls at any given time.
Email recipients can read your message at a time that suits them. Customers can also update their preferences.
They can choose if they would like to receive different messages from you or unsubscribe if they feel they no longer want to receive your email communications.
24) Environmentally-friendly
While this may not seem like much, the fact is email marketing is better for the environment than direct marketing.
Direct mail involves printed items, unlike emails where nothing is printed.
25) Increase Donations to your Cause
As fundraising efforts continue to move online, it’s important for nonprofits to adapt their outreach efforts as well.
One of the ways to do that is to use email campaigns to increase donations for well-meaning causes and emergencies if that’s in your line of work.
For example, if you’re part of a community outreach to protect neighborhood pets, you can help by Incorporating the content in your email.
This also works when you don’t quite have the funds. People will be glad to lend a helping hand.
26) Get Professional Assistance
There’s no limit to what you can achieve with email marketing, even if you lack the most basic of skills to execute it perfectly.
But with top email marketing services like SendPulse and Constant Contact, etc. you’ll have the tools and training you need to get started quickly regardless of your level of marketing experience or expertise.
The best part? When you do get stuck, you can always use a team of professionals who are dedicated to your success.
27) Promote Services
One thing service businesses face is the difficult challenge of keeping clients interested in their business, even when they aren’t looking for services at different times of the year.
If that’s your small business, email gives you the opportunity to keep your client’s attention without overwhelming them with the information they simply don’t need.
28) Owning your Media and Contact Lists
Platforms like social media don’t let you own your contact list or even the information you post.
That’s because the content you post and your follower list is ultimately managed by the social media platforms.
It’s not uncommon for events to happen leading up to the demise of your account.
As such, your followers and customers would be lost forever.
For this reason, it is all the more important for brands, especially small businesses to build an email list.
Such a contact list belongs to you and you can interact with them regardless of the email provider.
Also, you’ll own the content that you produce and send.
Conclusion
To remain in business it’s important that you should always try to communicate with your customers and prospects on a consistent basis.
That is the most important requirement of businesses in today’s world.
With email marketing, you can meet and surpass those expectations and more.
All you have to do is create and nurture a mutually beneficial relationship between your business and your email subscribers.
The benefits of email marketing are that it can help you to build your brand, achieve your marketing goals, and build you up to become an expert.
Email marketing can also help you grow your business revenue and also stay within your budget.
