The latest digital marketing trends may momentarily divert your attention, but it’s no secret that email marketing is here to stay. 🤟🏻Just imagine this: More than 300 billion emails are being sent and received daily worldwide. It begs the question — what are the benefits of email marketing for small businesses?
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer looking to refine your strategies or you’re a curious newcomer who wants to understand the potential of email marketing, this guide is for you.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves sending targeted emails to recipients (collectively known as an “email list”) in order to achieve certain goals. These goals include:
- Driving sales
- Expanding your customer base
- Reinforcing your brand identity, which allows you to stay top-of-mind
- Increasing traffic to your website or blog
- Promoting an online event or webinar
- Retaining customers
Like other marketing strategies, email marketing can be as simple or as complex as you make it. Of course, this could depend on various factors.
Take, for instance, a new business with a small list of subscribers that can simply send a straightforward email to everyone.
However, as that business acquires more subscribers, managing their email list becomes more challenging. One reason is that they need to make sure their list is up to date (meaning that every person on the list is active) and that it is properly segmented.
When done right, email marketing can be a cornerstone of your marketing efforts. 😉
6 Email Marketing Small Business Benefits
Email marketing can definitely help small businesses in many aspects, all while being budget-friendly and measurable. Let’s discuss some of these benefits below.
1. Cost-Effectiveness and ROI
There are different reasons email marketing has a lower cost compared to traditional marketing methods.
Rather than investing in print advertisements, email marketing allows for better, more precise targeting — which increases the relevance of your messages depending on your audience. Another important reason is that it offers automation features that save time, allowing you to work on other high-ROI activities.
Based on the latest email marketing stats, email marketing can generate an average of $36 for every US dollar spent.
🤓 Pro Tip: Focus on retaining customers using email marketing, which reduces the need for expensive acquisition efforts. Use engagement techniques in your email communications to nurture relationships. You can, for instance, run a monthly referral contest and provide exclusive offers to your email list! 🎁
2. Direct and personalized communication with customers
Every email you send out gets delivered directly to a recipient's inbox. Moreover, recipients can respond to your emails — they may ask questions, provide feedback (in the case of email surveys), or seek assistance. This allows for two-way communication, which ultimately increases engagement.
When it comes to personalization, brands will be able to create personalized email content using the following techniques:
- Addressing recipients with their first names
- Considering your audience’s preferences and past interactions when writing emails
- Doing A/B testing to find out which email subject lines and content resonate best with your recipients
- Recommending products or services based on their purchase history
🤓 Pro Tip: Be sure to collect as much data as possible about your subscribers. The more data you have, the more personalized your emails can be! Check out this guide on creating buyer personas to help you write emails that get results.
3. Builds and nurtures customer relationships
As we mentioned previously in this article, direct communication and personalization can keep engagement high.
Nurturing the relationship you have with your email list is important for generating repeat business and reducing churn. This is because when people feel valued, they’re more likely to return and make additional purchases. Moreover, there is less chance for these customers to leave your business for a competitor.
🤓 Pro Tip: Sometimes, business owners find themselves dealing with a disengaged or inactive email list. This happens for different reasons. In this situation, we recommend doing a re-engagement campaign (or “win-back” campaign) where you turn these subscribers back into active customers. However, it doesn’t hurt to gradually remove them from your active email list either as part of maintaining a healthy email list! ♥️
4. Automation and time efficiency
Email marketing is also known for its time efficiency, thanks to the fact that many of its aspects can be automated. Some of the things it can streamline include:
- Your campaigns: Marketers can schedule email campaigns in advance so that messages reach their intended audience at the most optimal times.
- Welcome emails: When a new subscriber joins your email list or a new customer makes a purchase, an automated welcome email can be sent to them immediately. These emails are a great opportunity to introduce your brand, products, and services.
- Abandoned cart recovery: E-commerce businesses can address cart abandonment by sending automated reminders to customers who leave their shopping carts. As a result, they’re encouraged to complete their purchases.
🤓 Pro Tip: There may be occasions where automated emails need to be updated. Every now and then, regularly update your email content to keep engagement levels high and reduce unsubscribes. This includes seasonal content, branding (in case you change your logo, etc.), and even birthday and anniversary emails.
5. Generates and converts leads
Lead generation is the first step in which you collect people’s contact information through different means. For example, at UpViral, we use contests and giveaways where people can refer their friends to your business, allowing you to generate quality leads.
With the leads you collect, you use email marketing campaigns to nurture these leads over time. These are great opportunities to include calls-to-action (CTAs) within your emails to encourage recipients to complete a desired action, whether that’s:
- Making a purchase
- Learning more about your product
- Requesting a quote
- Leaving a review (Read this article on how to collect customer feedback)
- Getting a free trial of your product
🤓 Pro Tip: Don’t rely on one email to meet your conversion goals. Instead, use multi-email sequences — meaning, you send an automated series of emails, which allows you to nurture leads over time and provides more opportunities for conversion.
6. Provides data-driven insights
Last but not least, email marketing is highly data-driven. In fact, data plays a role in executing and more importantly — optimizing your email campaigns.
To use data to your advantage, pay attention to metrics such as your open rates, click-through rates (CTR), conversions, and unsubscribes. These numbers will tell you how effective your campaigns are and guide the decisions you make.
🤓 Pro Tip: Collect feedback! In these surveys, you can ask them about their overall satisfaction with your emails. Moreover, create an email preference center where subscribers can update their preferences. They get to decide how often they want to receive emails and indicate their interests.
Conclusion
For small businesses looking to connect and thrive in a competitive marketplace, you’ve just learned in this post that email remains an indispensable tool. 🙌🏻
Is your goal right now to achieve rapid email list growth? UpViral is a powerful tool for creating viral campaigns that incentivize your existing subscribers or customers to refer others to join your email list.
Even better, UpViral integrates with many popular email marketing platforms so that data is easily transferred between UpViral and your email lists. Learn more by checking out these campaign examples and success stories from our users.
