19+ Reasons To Use Email Marketing For Your Small Business
Investing your hard-earned funds in your small business is a great move. You only have to ensure that whatever you’re spending that money on is worth the budget.
That’s because marketing often takes the back seat when it comes to funds or budget allocation in a good number of small businesses.
If you want to grow your small business to enviable status, you’ll need to implement certain digital marketing ideas.
Top of the pile stands email marketing. It’s a great tool to boost your communication skills and relate effectively with your customers.
Not only is it affordable, but it is also highly beneficial in many ways, including bringing your products and services up close and personal to your target audience.
That way, you have a more personal relationship with your clients.
If you’re skeptical about the benefits and advantages of email marketing, let the following reasons why you should use it for your small business convince you.
Table of Contents
But first, What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing tool that involves delivering or sending a message to a group of people or parties through an email service for commercial purposes.
This form of marketing can include newsletters with updates on the company, promotions of sales, and exclusive deals for subscribers.
However, for the process to be fully considered as email marketing, the commercial message should be sent to all current customers or prospective ones.
Besides, in comparison to Facebook and Twitter combined, email is forty times more effective in helping business owners gain new followers.
Email marketing is not just a multidimensional marketing strategy, but one that allows businesses to keep their customers informed and tailor their marketing messages to their audience.
So, Why Use Email Marketing For Your Small Business?
1) It is Affordable
Email marketing is cheap when you compare the costs to other services or tools. For example, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising costs more. Email marketing has a cost average that could get as low as $0.004 per mail.
In line with that, it’s one marketing technique that you can afford to invest your money in.
The results you get are worth the investments.
2) Build Credibility
People will always do business with who they know, or patronize businesses they’re familiar with.
With email, you have the ability to build credibility with your audience when you share helpful and informative content.
What’s more, you have more space to track and attract new clients. As such, it makes it easier to create a special business bond with your target audience.
3) Mobile and Desktop Sync
Emails can be received on a raft of devices including mobile phones and desktop computers.
For mobile devices, research shows that more than 50% of emails are opened on mobile phones now.
Also, over 2.7 billion humans actively engaged on mobile phones.
Your emails will be received by your target audience via phones or desktops.
To that end, your small business is bound to grow to another level with this global marketing.
4) Boost Sales
Boosting sales is simple math on email marketing.
That’s because the mere fact that you have an audience of people interested in receiving updates from your business, means you’ll have a better chance of converting them.
The response is not only immediate from your customers, but you have a better opportunity to share how your products and services will suit them.
5) It is Measurable
It’s a given that unlike other internet marketing services, email marketing tools offer the ability to track what happens after you have sent out your email campaign.
Some of the things you can track include:
- delivery rates,
- bounce rates,
- unsubscribe rates,
- click-through rates, and
- open rates.
What you get is a better understanding of how your email campaigns are working.
You’ll learn what’s progressing and what’s impeding your growth. Also, it’ll help you learn what areas to tweak or put in more effort.
Ignoring the metrics can be dangerous. They are just as important as the whole strategy.
The measurable aspect means you get to know your customers and how to provide valuable content.
6) A Combination of Email and Marketing Automation Makes Communication Smooth and Efficient
You know you can automate emails, right? You won’t have to sit around all day trying to customize messages or personalize them for an occasion.
Automation generally helps to reduce manual workload and satisfy customers through sending automated messages like the following:
- Welcome emails
- Thank you emails
- Rewards and discount emails
- Onboarding emails
- Order fulfillment and tracking emails
- Autoresponder emails for frequently asked questions
- Discount coupon emails to frequent customers
7) Revive and Reconnect with old Customers
Using email marketing means you have data that will take a great deal to disappear.
That means the information you provide about your business isn’t lost and can be refreshed to include new content.
The best part here is that your email list is ‘never lost’.
Unlike say, Facebook accounts, it’s very difficult for a compromised email list to be totally lost.
8) Send Exactly to those you want to
One of the perks of email marketing is that you can deliver mails to exactly the person or group you want, or where you want to easily.
If you want to send them to different people or groups, you’ll have to segment the list.
However, email marketing gives you a more direct approach that boils down to a personal touch for each of your customers.
9) Easy to Start and Operate
A marketing service that’s easy to start and operate should be a basic requirement.
Email marketing lives up to that expectation in more ways than one.
For example, your ability or knowledge to use such a service must not necessarily be at an expert level. That’s why it’s easier to start than other alternatives.
On many email marketing platforms, you get the hard yards done for you.
As such, there’s no pressing need for designing, printing, binding, mailing, or other processes required when dealing with physical mail-shots.
For starters, continuously and steadily build a database of your customers and send messages to them.
Only make sure your content is worth it even without necessarily adding any graphical content before sending it.
10) Increase Brand Awareness
If you think social media is the only platform that helps to increase a company’s brand awareness, think again.
Email marketing is far more than possessing a customer or prospect’s email address. What’s more, you don’t have to keep sending emails every single day.
Email marketing promotes your activeness in a local community.
What you want is customer trust rather than a quick-fire approach heard towards only generating sales.
Reasons to Use Email Marketing
11) Look Professional
A professional look speaks volumes about you and your business. That’s why you have a lot of email templates to use.
Such templates are easy to use and designed to make sure you look and sound professional when you reach out to your target audience.
When your email gets to their inbox, it has to carry the air of a serious (not overly) person.
Moreover, you can always insert your own content and customize each template with your logo and colors. That way, they match your brand’s color.
12) Get immediate results
Sometimes, it’s difficult to have to wait for a long time before getting results.
Sure, everything takes time, but with email marketing, you get to witness the results faster.
Every sale, order, and appointment can make an impact. It also helps that such results are trackable so you know what’s rewarding or not.
13) It’s timely
You’re never quite late with email marketing. To that end, one of the benefits is reaching your contacts on it me.
Considering the data at your disposal, it’s easier to send special offers on customers’ birthdays, or let them know their favorite dish is half off.
It all looks like you have a sense of urgency your customers will be pleased with.
14) Generate leads
While it’s true that everyone who joins your email list will likely make a purchase, you can still capture their attention and generate leads.
Email gives you the opportunity to capture a new visitor’s attention and nurture the relationship with helpful and informative content.
15) You make your own online marketing decisions
Making your own marketing decisions is one of the important aspects of email marketing.
You have total control and decide which of the marketing efforts suits your business, and audience.
Again, you’re also left to decide on the information to retrieve from your customers when they sign up for your email newsletter
16) Promote services
The fact is service businesses often face the difficult challenge of keeping clients interested in their business.
That’s the case even when they aren’t looking for services at different times of the year.
Email gives you the opportunity to keep your client’s attention without overwhelming them with unwanted information. That’s one sure way to promote your services.
17) Increased Traffic to your Website
Many small businesses have figured out that having a website actually helps.
In line with that, emails represent a great way to get customers to visit your website.
You can also insert relevant links to your site within your email content.
It’s also possible to use your email campaigns to get customers to engage with other pieces of content that feature on your website or blog.
For example, a coffee shop could send out emails to let people know about new days for discounts and how many people they cater to.
So if many of their customers and potential lead missed out on this opportunity, they can check out the website.
18) Build excitement
What’s that special product you want to introduce to your customers.
Hold off a bit by systematically releasing some information.
The thing is, many people love to belong to a special group, especially when they can receive exclusive perks.
Your customers aren’t all the same, and one plan doesn’t work for all. That’s why you have to make everyone feel unique. Show them how important they are to your business.
You can give a section of your loyal customers a sneak peek into upcoming product launches and events.
Again, you can simply reward them for being loyal customers. People love a sweet deal and many brands do their best to provide one. Don’t be any different.
As a small business, you might not be able to give everyone a free gift or discount.
But it’s important to note that rewarding the loyal ones is a nice gesture, and a good way to accelerate your marketing goals.
19) Attract new clients
Every business, small or large, wants to remain relevant for a long time. Part of that is being able to attract new clientele.
When you connect to people on your email list, you can also share your newsletters and announcements on your own social networks. This will help you bring in new people to your business.
Your established customers can also help spread the word about your business.
People get to see what you offer, even if that’s not one-on-one.
However, with each newsletter, you have the opportunity to show people what your business is all about.
20) Start a Conversation
Email marketing lets you ignite a two-way conversation that benefits you and your readers.
Don’t just work on pushing your message out to them; encourage them to share their feedback and ideas via tools like surveys or polls.
Such an approach has worked well for many companies. That means you can trust to work for you.
Feedbacks let your customers know you value their advice and general contributions.
21) Start and Share your Success Story
Stories are great ways to show just how far you’ve come in your business.
All the better if you have used email marketing every step of the way.
That way, you can be a point of reference for other small businesses and customers who want to set up a business.
22) Everyone (almost) uses Email
If you flip it the other way, everyone uses emails. According to a Hubspot survey, 91% of consumers use email.
That alone should be enough to convince you to explore any tool that further enhances its appeal.
Even if the industry your do business in accounts for the remaining 9%, email presents an incredible opportunity to reach customers.
Not only can you provide them with information, discounts, and other stuff, but they can share and forward those emails to anyone they’d like.
A good email marketing strategy you can always adopt is encouraging customers to share offers as much as possible.
Remember, brand awareness is key, and about 60% of customers subscribe to a brand’s email list in order to receive promotional messages.
23) It is Personal and Private
Communicating with your customers through email marketing represents a personal and private channel only both of you can use.
Moreover, you have the option of personalizing your messages, including various personalized offers, and deals to each customer as so desired.
What that does is help you establish and improve the individual relationship you both have.
Besides, email marketing gives you the ability to arrange your audience into lists and foster trust.
That is much unlike other marketing channels in the messages one sends to others.
24) Email Inspires Consumer Action
Every marketing message most certainly comes with a call to action.
Through that, you’re asking someone to acknowledge your brand, to sign-up, to learn about your new products, to visit your website, and then to make a purchase.
That’s what email marketing does – because it’s a great way to inspire consumer action.
Besides that, it’s a way to embed call-to-action buttons in your emails. You can use such buttons to do the following:
- Offer discounts
- Ask people to sign-up for your latest course
- Direct them to your blog/website
- Nudge them towards a sale
- Ask to share content on social networks
- Ask them for referrals
25) Strengthen Relationships
Building strong customer relationships is imperative for any type of business. Small businesses, in particular, need an effective tool to communicate with the people who matter most to their business – the customer.
With email marketing, you have the ability to stay top-of-mind and keep people engaged with your business all through the year.
You’ll forge stronger and better relationships with your potential customers.
Bottom Line
Email marketing works because it allows you to keep in touch with your customers on a consistent basis.
Whether you send a simple “Thank you for subscribing,” or a welcome message, it’s one of the best ways to show how valuable your customers are to your business.
Customers love a treat, but love to be valued more, and treated with respect.
That value can be expressed through the emails you send. When they derive more value from you, they’ll want to take things to the next level.
They’re now assured of your responses so it’s easier to make a purchase from your business.
That engagement is something you can work on overtime so that they become lifetime customers.
What are you waiting for? Take advantage of these reasons to use email marketing for your small business!