What is email marketing and why does it matter?
Thanks to email, we can do business with people on the other side of the world in a matter of minutes. The scale of email’s potential is also huge, with more than 3.9 billion email addresses worldwide providing businesses with masses of opportunity to engage new audiences. When utilized properly, email has a huge role to play in creating lasting, profitable relationships between small businesses and customers.
Email is considered the most critical factor in marketing success by over 40% of B2B marketers. 80% of business professionals consider email a vital aspect in customer retention. And when used properly, email has the potential to deliver the greatest ROI of every marketing channel achieving $52 for every dollar spent in 2019. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 73% of consumers also said that email is their preferred marketing channel.
Every marketing channel has its advantages. It’s easy to see the likes and shares expanding in real time over social media, while print and broadcast marketing offer clout. But for more than a decade, email consistently produces excellent results.
Save considerable time and effort
As a small business owner, you wear many hats and have to manage your time carefully, especially during the early days. How well you accomplish this goes a long way in determining your business’ success. And if you’re hard-pressed for time, unable to focus on marketing, your bottom line takes a beating.
Email marketing can help you breathe easy with its simplicity and time-saving facets. Considering how user-friendly email marketing tools are, you can get started easily, even with very little expertise. Craft compelling content, pick the right template, and merge them both together, and you’re ready to go.
With automation also booming big time, you can send targeted and relevant emails to your audience to help drive sales. For example, schedule different follow-up emails to your contacts based on various actions like open, link clicks, and more. Once your contacts meet a trigger condition you set, an email will automatically be sent to them. Put simply, just define a process and watch automation take care of the rest. See some of the best email marketing trends for 2022
Develop your own unique brand
Think about some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Some brand names have become so well known that they’re synonymous with the industry they operate in.
Kleenex is a great example of this. What if your small business could have a clearly identifiable brand like that?
Email marketing is a great way to develop your brand because it gives you a direct line to the email inboxes of your customers or potential customers. Regular updates give you a great opportunity to create a unique voice, style, and image for your subscribers.
What do you want your brand to be? Create a brand guide and follow it with each and every email you send. Not only is each email an opportunity to connect with your subscribers, but it’s also an opportunity to further cement your unique brand identity in their minds.
Why is email so useful?
All marketing, ultimately, is about building relationships. Sure, there’s an end goal—the brand wants something from the customer and the customer wants something from the brand. Hence, the most useful forms of marketing are those which help to form connections and build long-lasting relationships between brands, customers, and potential customers. And this is where email really shines.
Opening an email is more of a personal commitment than scrolling past an ad on a social media timeline. Someone who clicks on your email is immediately committed to and engaged with your content.
Once you’ve gained a spot in someone’s inbox, you’ll be able to communicate with them on a far more personal and individual level than might otherwise be the case. Email is, by its nature, a channel for one-on-one communication, and the best email marketing strategies take advantage of that.
Through email marketing, you can speak directly to each individual customer. You can send them the content, offers, and updates most relevant for their circumstances. You can address their concerns on a bespoke level, and you can tailor your content in a way which feels personal to them. Email is your best tool for engaging new customers, and it’s your best tool for retaining the loyalty of older customers.
Email is also extremely versatile. You can do a lot and say a lot with a well-crafted email campaign. So long as you can land in inboxes and keep your subscribers interested, there’s no limit to the kind of content you can send them. This opens up a wealth of opportunities for marketing, relationship building, and generally expanding your customer base.
Streamline your sales process
What hurts more than not being able to find leads for your business? It’s having leads but failing to nurture and convert them. If you’re experiencing this problem, email marketing could be the missing link that you’ve needed.
Emails help you maintain meaningful and relevant communication with your leads until they’re sales-ready. For example, if you run an e-commerce business, you can try showcasing the USPs of a product along with reviews and ratings to shoppers who abandoned their carts at checkout, say, one to two days after their exploration. As a next step, you can try sending coupons. This way, you’ll be able to nurture your leads at regular intervals.
Additionally, email marketing is highly measurable and lets you easily track the behavior of your recipients. The cues you get from your email campaign results could even lay a solid foundation for a sales call.
Become an expert with expert content
As a small business owner, you’re likely seen as a local or regional expert when it comes to your area of business. One way to further cement this identity in the minds of consumers is to continue positioning yourself as an expert through the use of content.
Email marketing doesn’t have to just be about delivering coupons and sale information. In addition to emails designed to drive traffic to your business, you can use email marketing to deliver unique content that your subscribers will enjoy reading—or watching.
When you use blogs or videos as a part of your email campaign, you’re adding value to each and every email you send.
Not only does this build your reputation as an expert, but it also builds the reputation of your business communications. People will be excited to receive emails from you because they know you deliver quality content regularly.
If you already offer expert content through a blog or YouTube channel, then you may want to consider offering exclusive, email-only content in order to convince people to subscribe to your email list.
Your content is one of your most valuable marketing tools, and you can use it to build other areas of your marketing strategy. If people love what you do, then they’ll sign up to see more great content. Best of all, that content gets delivered directly to them.
Promote your business content
Emails can act as an ideal launchpad for your content marketing activities. For example, let’s say you’ve published a blog and it isn’t garnering enough attention; email newsletters can offer the initial push that your content needs. An effective subject line, attractive email template, and relevant content is all it takes to send out a newsletter. Even better, if your blog strikes the right chord with your audience, they might even share it across platforms
Final thoughts
For any business, expanding their network holds the key for progress. Email marketing not only helps you do that but also helps you capture genuinely interested contacts. How? It can be done through the sign-up forms your email marketing software generates. Once placed in your website or other platforms, your visitors use the sign-up form to express their consent to receive newsletters and promotional emails.