Deciding where you invest your marketing budget can sometimes be a difficult decision to make for your business. It doesn’t matter whether you are big or small, online or offline… you know you need to attract new customers and keep your existing clients coming back. This concept helps to grow revenue, which is what we want as business owners.
The problem is… you also don’t want to invest time or resources into something that isn’t going to deliver the results you expect.
However…
There is one marketing channel I LOVE and highly recommend to business owners and that is of course email marketing.
“And why is that?” you might ask?
An email marketing campaign is a very cost-effective solution that gives you the power to reach new leads & customers in a place most people visit every day — their inbox.
There is also a lot of evidence to back up the power of email marketing for businesses. For example –
“91 percent of US adults like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with” (MarketingSherpa)
“Email is almost 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in helping your business to acquire new customers.” (McKinsey)
“Email marketing technology is used by 82% of B2B and B2C companies.” — Ascend2
Here’s one of my favorite stats –
“More than 59% of businesses identify email marketing as the most effective marketing channel for their brand. And reliance on email marketing will only increase in the upcoming year as distrust in social media continues to grow, as does the need for authentic connection.”
So now you may be wondering, how can email marketing really make a difference in your business? To answer that question, I’ve put together a list of a few reasons why email marketing is one of the best digital marketing tactics that ANY business, big or small can invest in.
Below I have put together a list of nine examples of how businesses benefit from using email marketing and why you should be using it in your business if you’re not already!
Consumers Prefer Email
The first point I want to mention and perhaps the most important to us as business owners, is that consumers prefer email when receiving messages from brands. While social media has become a popular way for businesses to communicate with their audience, brands sometimes just can’t get the organic reach they are looking for through these channels. Email provides a professional and direct medium that allows businesses to reach out to their leads and customers.
“So why do they prefer email over the likes of social media?”
I believe this to be true because email is a permission based medium. This means that the people on your list actually signed up because they want to get updates & notifications from the business. They’re interested in learning more about your brand including your promotions and discounts.
That alone makes email marketing such an effective strategy to reach your consumers. There was one study I came across from the ever reliable Marketing Sherpa, which reported that 72% of consumers prefer to receive promotional messages through email. So that figure alone should give you the push to use email as a way to stay connected with your prospects and customers.
Let’s dive a little deeper as to why consumers prefer email as a channel of communication.
- Email is personal. Today’s modern consumer is targeted with marketing messages, day in.. day out! From billboards, to TV, flyers and social media. In most cases these messages are not personal to consumers. However, consumers tend to respond best to those brands that are personalized and relevant to them. Email allows you to personalize your messages and content based on the subscribers preferences and buying patterns. This is done through email segmentation, making it easier to deliver the most relevant offers and content to the customer.
- Email is convenient. Gone are the days where the only option you had was to check your email using your desktop computer! We now have access to email right on our smartphones and most consumers find this very convenient. Not only can consumers stay connected with their favorite brands wherever they are, but they can easily redeem any coupon codes or other special offers right from their phone. Now that’s convenient!
- Email is now! Consumers like the ability to get information about the brands they love with exclusive offers and last minute deals the brands have. Email can offer this at an instant! Sending email campaigns allow your business to instantly and directly get the word out about these sales and promotions so that your prospects & customers can take advantage of the opportunity to save money on a deal.
This can also be described to businesses as having an instant cash machine. You need help with driving sales this week? Why not send out a creative promotion to entice your email subscribers to buy now. Think flash sales, two for one, buy one get one free… that type of thing.
Email Builds Relationships
The next point on the list I want to mention is the idea of building relationships with new leads that come into your business as well as existing customers. If you want to build strong customer relationships, it’s important to have an effective tool to communicate with the people who matter most to your business.
Email gives you the ability to stay top-of-mind and keep people engaged with your business during your busy season and the slower times of the year.
I always recommend sending out regular email to prospects and customers with information such as –
- Educational content (“7 Things Women Do With Great Hair Everyday!” — If you are a hair salon for example
- Coupons and Sales Promotions (10% Off Pressure Washing Service)
- Loyalty or Reward Programs (Spend $100 On Your Next Order & Get a Free Gift On Us!)
- Company News and Updates (We’re expanding to a new location! )
- Contests and Sweepstakes (Enter For a chance to Win $100 in Store Credit)
- Free Content like E-Books (We Love Our Customers So Much, We Want You To Have This Ebook Normally Valued At $19.95… FREE!)
- Products or Service Information (Were launching a new service that we think you’re going to LOVE!)
You get the picture right? You can offer a ton of value to your email list on topics that interest them and showcase some great offers to them also. As with any relationship you build, offer plenty of value upfront. Email is just like any other type of communication channel, you need to work on engaging with your audience. Building engagement with your audience on the points I have mentioned above will help you build trust, respect and rapport! Making it easier to sell to when you present an offer to them.
Helps To Improve Communication
Email marketing helps your business to improve communications. There’s not one successful business I’ve ever come across that hasn’t benefited from a communication tool such as email to liaise with their list of leads and customers.
Email does a great job of generating brand awareness and sales. But it’s also a great communication tool for after care sales, questions, queries and other elements of communication your prospects and customer might be having.
As mentioned in the first point, email is personal. It’s a very direct way of communicating to your prospects and customers. The way it allows you to segment your messaging to those people that are in different parts of your sales funnel, really helps to improve communication.
Email Marketing is Affordable
Another BIG reason why I love email marketing is how affordable it is for businesses to reach their audience and engage with them. Email marketing is a cost-effective way to get your message out. There are costs involved in messaging your audience and the larger your audience grows, the more costly it gets. But it’s still a very affordable and cost effective medium to market with.
Traditional marketing tactics like TV & radio ads, direct mail and even print can cost thousands of dollars over the course of a year, email marketing offers businesses to reach a wide audience for just pennies per recipient. Such a significant ROI allows you to do more with less, which is why email marketing is great for businesses and in particular those with smaller budgets to work with. Additional costs you might need to consider are things like the copy writing of the email content or unique graphics you may include as part of the aesthetics in the email.
Email Boost sales
As a business owner, you’ll like to hear that email does in fact boast sales for your business.
When you have access to an audience of people who opt in to receive updates, informational content, sales and promotions from your business, you’ll be able to think differently about how you boost sales throughout the year.
Because email allows you as a business owner to segment your subscribers into different lists based on how far down the sales funnel they are, you have opportunities to boost sales to those lists that are most likely to convert into sales.
If you are having a slow week, you can develop a promotional email to get new business through the door. For example, you could offer a coupon promotion for the next five days only on your product/service and send that out to your email list.
I actually did this with a client of mine for a hair salon business. We created an irresistible offer to entice people on the clients email list to come to the salon to get their discount on one of their services. After the five days of promotion, we managed to get 34 new appointments booked in. Not too shabby for sending out a couple of emails right?
What was amazing to notice, was that 53% of those appointments booked were in fact first time customers. They had been on the clients prospecting list and once they got word of this time sensitive irresistible offer, they were more inclined had to take advantage of this promotion. This email campaign not only got prospects off the fence, but provided the hair salon did a great job with these new clients, the lifetime value from these new customers can really escalate revenue for this business for years to come.
And all of this… just from sending a few emails that cost the client next to nothing to send! Just think of that return on investment!
Email Helps You Reach More Mobile Consumers
Smartphones have made it easier for business owners to market their services directly to people on the go! It’s no secret that today’s consumer has become increasingly more mobile. This proves yet again why email marketing is ideal for reaching your prospects & customers.
Many of these smartphone users won’t use their device to go shopping (me included :P), but very interestingly, checking up on email is one of the most popular activities for smartphone users, beating out web browsing, the Facebook app, and even apps for maps or directions.
Check out the graph below –
So because of the popularity of email on mobile devices, this suggests that this really is a fantastic way for businesses to reach out to their mobile consumers. In addition, it allows your business to reach beyond smartphones to connect with consumers on other types of mobile devices like tablets.
As you can see from the info graphic below, 48% of emails are opened on mobile devices, and 69% of mobile users will delete emails that aren’t optimized for their device. What this tells us is that if you’re not working to optimize your marketing emails for mobile then you may be missing out on the opportunity to reach these mobile consumers.
Trust me! I have experienced this first hand. My software team and I built an email marketing platform and when we were testing our emails, we noticed many issues with how our emails were being presented when opened on the likes of Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo etc. with different devices.
Email Offers Trackable Results
Email marketing allows you to track the results of your email messages which in return, helps you to figure out what campaigns work and what doesn’t. Email marketing platforms allow you to create messages to your prospects and customers.
When those messages are sent, you can view a report that shows metrics such as –
- Open Rates. — How many people actually opened your email
- Click Rates — How many people clicked on a link in your messages. You could have a link that drives your prospects or customers to a page on your website that’s offering a promotion of some sort
- Unsubscribes — How many of those on your list unsubscribed from your emails.
- Spam Rate — How much of your email message hit the spam folder
- Revenue Generated — You can track what emails made you money and who on your list actually bought
- Open By Device — This tells you a breakdown of all the devices that were used by your list that engaged with your email.
Depending on the email service provider you use, you can pick up more metrics than the ones I’ve mentioned above. These metrics are great feedback because they allow you to see what messages are resonating with your audience and from there you can continue to create and send more of those messages.
Stay Top of Mind
Using Email Marketing helps your business to stay top of mind with your audience. You do this by sharing relevant content with your audience throughout the year. The end result of this endeavor is that you’ll be able to stay top-of-mind and build credibility.
While some of your audience may not be ready to act right away with offers you are promoting, there is a very good chance they’ll act at some point throughout the year with a problem you are trying to help solve for them.
Sharing relevant content to them and keeping them informed on a regular basis keeps you top of mind. When your prospects or previous customers are ready to buy, you’ll be the first thought that comes to mind!
Email Helps You Generate More Leads & Sales
My final point on why I love email marketing (honestly I could write many more), is because using this medium can actually help you generate more leads for your business. Yes indeed! Whether you’ve got 10 or 10,000 email subscribers to email, you can use this audience to help you generate more leads for your business.
How you say?
By creating a referral program that encourages your current subscribers to go out there and find like minded people that would be a great fit for your business. This doesn’t have to be complicated. Let me give you an example –
Let’s say you run an ecom store and you want new leads. If you’ve built up a subscriber base of customers, why not send them an email that thanks them for their business. Then move onto say that you are offering anyone of your customers a referral fee if they can send business your way.
How much you offer as a referral fee depends entirely on your business. You should understand how much a customer is worth to you in terms of average first time customer purchase as well as average lifetime value. Knowing these figures will help you to decide on what referral fee to offer. Obviously the more of a fee, the more attractive this offer gets for your customers.
You can also double down on this by offering these first time customers that come in via customer referrals by offering some form of incentive. You don’t have to offer a standard 10% discount. It could be a free gift of some sort.
Getting back to email… you have the target audience to reach using email marketing. It’s a simple referral program you can communicate to your satisfied customer base, very cost effectively and can dramatically increase your target lead count and customer base. All thanks to email marketing!
