If you’re a small business looking to jumpstart your marketing strategy, then you should consider email marketing. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, email marketing is an accessible and powerful tool that small businesses seem to overlook nowadays—even when we only look at the numbers for the Gen Z and millennial age groups.
According to a Campaign Monitor survey, around 90% of millennials say that they check their email at least once a day. In fact, 74.9% admit to checking multiple times throughout their day. 81% of Gen Z respondents, on the other hand, say they check their emails at least once a day. These numbers are just too difficult to ignore for those drawing out their marketing plans.
If the above numbers still don’t convince you, then here are some clear benefits of email marketing.
Benefits of Email Marketing for Your Small Business
1. You can personalize your content depending on your (already interested) audience.
The beauty of email marketing is that those on your email list have signed up to get updates from your business. This means they have an interest in your business and what you’re offering. But remember: while these users signed up for your email list, they can easily unsubscribe when they don’t feel engaged. This is where personalization and targeting come in. It’s up to you to segment them based on their level of interest and where they are in their customer journey. Once you’ve accomplished that, then you can easily personalize content based on the type of audience you’re talking to.
2. You can easily measure the results.
As a small business, you have to be smart with where you invest your time, effort, and resources. With email marketing and other digital marketing activities, you have access to valuable data and metrics. This is crucial in making sure you know how much you’re getting in exchange for the effort and money you’re putting in. Additionally, having access to important data means you’re better equipped to improve your future campaigns; you can easily identify which strategies work for you and which ones need more work.
3. It’s easy to get started.
The important first step that will kickstart your email marketing campaign is to create a professional email address. You wouldn’t want your recipients thinking they’ve received spam emails from a bogus sender. Create a simple and suitable email address that represents your company. From there, it really depends on what your goals are, who and how big your target audience is, and how much marketing budget you can set aside for email marketing. If you’re just starting out, you can easily sign up for a free email marketing tool. When your audience and strategy evolve, then you can consider upgrading your account or switching to another platform.
4. It improves your lead management strategy.
Generating large volumes of sales leads is beneficial to your business, but only when you know how to screen, nurture, and manage them. It’s important to continuously engage with your target audience, even if they’re not exactly at the bottom of the sales funnel. In fact, email marketing can help you nurture leads, moving them from the interest or consideration phase down to the intent and eventually purchase stages.
5. It amplifies your other promotional campaigns.
If you want to set up loyalty and rewards programs, what better way to let your existing clientele know about them than through email marketing? Whether you have a brick-and-mortar store where you can put up marketing collateral or an online store where you can have banner ads, email marketing can help get your message and promotions across on a larger scale. Customers don’t have to step foot into your store or visit your website to know about your latest offerings. And even better, email marketing with clear calls-to-action (CTAs) can drive traffic to you, whether physical or digital.
6. You can kick things off with (almost) zero cost.
Email marketing is one of the most accessible and convenient ways to market your products and services. Other than your time and effort (which, of course, can also be considered resources), you don’t really need that much budget to get started. Especially when you’re just laying down the foundation of your email marketing campaign. You can maximize the many free tools online, from email marketing to grammar and plagiarism checkers, and even creative design tools. All you need is a little resourcefulness, creativity, and dedication to get started.
7. You add value to your customers.
Marketing is more about storytelling than hard-selling. Don’t get us wrong, email marketing can help bring in the numbers for your business. But you should use email marketing for more than just a digital sales spiel. You can use email marketing as a platform to create value-adding content for your audience: from newsletters with informative and relevant information to engaging pieces that tap into their passions. Email marketing can help tell your brand’s story and create a connection with your audience. This way, you can increase your brand’s relevance and recall, resulting in better customer loyalty.
Making the case for email marketing is easy given its clear benefits. When done well and regularly, it can give you a better return on marketing investment, improved brand equity and higher customer satisfaction—all key ingredients for small business success.