Small business tends to avoid email marketing.
For some reason, many small business owners and entrepreneurs just don’t see the value in it.
Some think it’s dying, while others feel like it isn’t worth the time.
But that kind of thinking is foolish.
For most small businesses, email marketing is critical to survival.
Today, I’m going to share why.
These Are The Biggest Reasons Your Small Business Needs Email Marketing
You might not understand the significance of great email marketing in the modern small business environment.
After all, it’s hard to believe a 30 plus-year-old medium could still be relevant in a world of direct messaging and video chat.
However, it’s got a bigger relevance and use than you think.
Here are the amazing things that small business email marketing can get you.
It Makes Your Sales Process More Efficient
Having no leads for your small business sucks.
Without leads, you can’t earn new customers.
But worse than that is not being able to convert your leads to customers.
When you can’t nurture your leads through the buying process, you’re likely experiencing that problem.
Email marketing is the missing piece in that puzzle.
Through emails, you can build and maintain relevant, meaningful communication and build relationships with your leads.
By sending them educational content, unique selling proposals, reviews, ratings, testimonials, case studies, and any other content that will help move them through the process.
Planning your email messages one step at a time, you can move through to their next logical phase with content and offers that support it.
This allows you to guide them through the buyer’s journey until they arrive at a sale.
If your sales process requires direct communication with a member of your sales team, emails can help lay the groundwork.
You can track how your audience responds to different emails to find out what connects for them.
In addition, you can bring your leads back to additional informative points on your website that allow you to collect more data about them.
That data will help the sales team prepare for the upcoming call, offering them a distinct advantage.
Your Customers Want You To Communicate With Email
Believe it or not, people like to hear from brands via email marketing.
Since 2013, in the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Report, people have consistently shown favor for email communications.
They’d rather receive product updates, sales announcements, or exclusive offers via email than through social media.
That gives you a great shot at using email to grow your customers.
For brick-and-mortar locations, email marketing is a great tool to help draw new customers into your location.
Think about it; you can use all kinds of growth tactics through your email communications.
Offer a discount to those on your list who bring a friend.
Share the dates and details of upcoming sales.
Announce a brand-new product to your existing audience and get them excited enough to tell people about it.
The point is to get them excited about coming in.
Emails can be used in ways beyond your list, however.
Adding social sharing buttons, for example, can help you spread your message and borrow the trust of your clients.
These buttons work especially well on sales and promotion emails that your leads and clients might want to tell friends about.
However, they aren’t limited to promotions.
New product or feature announcements can work equally well, especially in the case of highly requested products or features.
Make sure the sharing buttons are easy to see and click on multiple platforms.
People are more likely to share with their social pages that way.
When they do, it becomes a badge of trust for your brand to their connections.
Clients Will See Your Messages Wherever They Are
People spend more time checking emails on their phones than they do anything else.
It makes up the primary phone use activity for about three-quarters of smartphone users.
And, considering most people rarely have their phone out of earshot, they’ll likely see their emails when they come through.
Provided you’ve created an email format that works on all devices – not just desktops – they’ll see you whenever they check their inbox.
But what does that mean for your small business?
Email marketing is a direct line of communication with your leads.
Unlike other communication mediums, it’s considered acceptable to check them nearly anywhere.
Most people have their work emails attached to their phones along with their personal emails, and they receive their messages in the same collective inbox.
This means that email can reach your audience where and when other mediums can’t.
A reach like that changes the frequency that your audience sees your name.
You can hasten the process of building familiarity and trust.
Something like that has a big impact on small business.
Loyalty, which typically evolves out of the combination of trust and familiarity, is what determines how long a small business will survive.
Using email marketing to enhance this process can shift everything for your small business.
The Results Of Emails Are Easy To Measure
If your marketing isn’t working, you need to know.
The only way to find out is to measure the results.
Many forms of marketing are complicated to measure, however.
Especially when the time it takes your audience to move between exposure and sale is often months.
Email marketing, on the other hand, is simple to measure.
Various email marketing platforms, like SparkPost, MailChimp, or AWeber, have analytics tools immediately accessible.
From most of their dashboards you can see exactly what’s getting opened, what’s getting people back to your site, and in some cases, who bought because of that email.
Information like that is incredibly powerful.
It’s also essential for small businesses, who often can’t afford to let their marketing budget go to waste.
Results are everything, and email marketing’s ease of measurement helps you get better ones.
Taking this a step further, many email platforms also allow you to A/B test.
Data like that allows you to find out more apparently what works and what doesn’t.
And the faster you can collect this data, the faster you can perfect your email marketing strategy.
Obsessing over details can often be the difference in marketing success.
Email Marketing Has An Unmatched ROI
Truly, there is no form of marketing that has a return like email marketing.
With every dollar you spend on your emails, they can earn you back up to $44.
Yes, you read that right.
Email marketing provides an up to 4400% ROI.
Your small business could stand a little of that level earning, couldn’t it?
Putting different email types to work can maximize your ROI even more.
Adding an abandoned cart email, for example, can recover up to 69% of lost customers in e-commerce.
Welcome emails, the kinds that send whenever someone signs up for your email list, generate 320% more revenue per email than any other kind.
Can you see where this is headed?
But on the other side of the ROI is email marketing’s low cost.
Let’s do some quick math.
If you’re normal, your marketing budget makes up about 7%-8% of your revenue.
Typically, email marketing usually costs less than 20% of your total marketing budget.
It’s instantly apparent how little email costs.
That allows your ROI to build quickly, making email marketing an obvious benefit to your small business.
You Won’t Waste Your Time Or Money
Time and money are two things most small business owners are short on.
Wasting them simply isn’t an option.
You would think that a marketing tactic that’s got a high ROI and low cost would be an obvious choice.
Even more, the simple-to-measure nature of email should make it even more appealing.
However, most small business owners still see it as a waste.
Those time and budget constraints mean you need a way to reach your audience that’s super effective and not expensive.
Because let’s face it, no small business owner can afford a game day commercial.
Pretty much every form of marketing takes time and money.
The time consumption is also time away from making money.
Print ads have design and mailing costs to tack onto the cost of production.
Each mailer can cost several dollars after everything is amortized.
Sending mailers to even a regular-sized neighborhood could mean thousands of dollars.
But what if you could reach that same neighborhood for just a few dollars?
And what if it only took minutes to do so?
In addition, what if you knew within hours how well your campaign worked?
Would all that make email marketing worth your effort?
Most of the time it’s neither complicated nor time-consuming to build a great email campaign.
On every level, it’s the best way to spend your marketing money.
Pretty Much Anyone Can Handle Email Marketing
Email marketing is simple.
Not simplistic or easy, but simple.
What does that mean?
Most email marketing platforms are user-friendly.
They make all the tools to create, send, and track your campaign easy to understand and use.
And most of them offer built-in templates and content suggestions to help make creating your emails even easier.
These options make the process very simple to understand.
That’s great for the average small business owner.
Often small business owners aren’t tech-savvy or email marketing experts.
While most can navigate basic interfaces, they can’t write the underlying code.
Email marketing platforms handle that part for you, using drag-and-drop interfaces that allow users to create something that looks right with ease.
Cutting down the need for technical knowledge, email marketing becomes accessible for anyone.
Only the content of the message is left.
Nearly the only time you’ll need to hand this off if you don’t have the time constraint is when you struggle with words.
If you’re not a talented communicator, an agency might be a better choice.
But for the rest of us, email is generally something we can handle.
You Can Automate Your Emails
How would you like to take care of the bulk of email marketing without sitting in front of a device?
Any time a small business owner can do multiple things at once, it’s a benefit.
Because email can be automated, it becomes something you don’t need to actively participate in.
Let me elaborate.
Some of the marketing emails I talked about earlier are automated.
You won’t manually send welcome messages or abandoned cart emails.
That would diminish the value of the tools you’re using.
Additionally, emails are easy to schedule in advance.
Campaigns can be developed ahead of time and scheduled to send over the course of weeks.
Drip campaigns can be triggered to send a specific message to your leads when they sign up on a specific form or page.
Imagine how easy your life would become if your website automatically contacted a lead who just visited a critical buying page on your site, like the pricing page.
Or if you could plan out a six-week email campaign and schedule it in an afternoon so you could focus on other things while those emails sent.
Those opportunities would change things for your small business for certain.
Only email marketing can do that for you.
Get The Chance To Build Great Relationships With Your Customers
You feel special when someone is thinking about you and lets you know.
So do your customers.
They want to feel like more than a sale to you and your small business.
Updates, events, and announcements are all communications that your clients want.
Why not give it to them when it’s something so simple?
I’m sure you’re aware that phone calls to every customer just won’t happen.
Not every week or month when you should be making calls to prospective new clients.
And mailers aren’t rational choices when the likelihood of a return is super low.
But email makes a great choice.
News about your company, from product launches to big events, makes great content for a regular newsletter.
Remember, your customers should be opting for emails from your company.
Don’t hesitate to send them out and make that contact.
Look, most people are checking their emails before they get out of bed every morning.
It’s a dumb move to miss out on being one of the first companies on their minds before their coffee and breakfast.
By sending those emails, you can be on their mind from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed.
If you’re delivering great content that’s worth reading, you might even take the place a newspaper used to at the breakfast table.
Email Marketing Is Key For Your Small Business To Grow
By now, you ought to understand the significant role email marketing should be playing in your small business growth.
Find out what you need to do to put the systems and strategies in place that match your industry.
Develop a solid email marketing plan.
Execute and watch email marketing skyrocket your small business growth in ways you thought it couldn’t.
