Email Marketing Is Still The King.
What if I told you… I’d give you $42 for every $1 you gave me?
That’s the average return on investment (ROI) for a good email marketing campaign, even higher for service related businesses.
Sounds pretty good. As a small business your email list should be priority #1 when it comes to marketing, not to mention a core part of your overall business strategy.
Why Email Continues to Be Effective
The people on your email list are the one’s most interested in your business, they have actively raised their hand and signed up for promotional material. These will always be your most qualified leads and provide the highest rate of return for your time and money.
Did you know 49% of consumers look forward to promotional emails from brands/companies they are interested in. Does the surprise you?
Think about some of your favorite local businesses, do you like to receive offers from them? I do.
Email Marketing is Targeted
Segmenting your subscribers is quick and easy with email providers like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. Once you segment your list you’ll be able to personalize messages or promotions to each category you’ve set up. Personal messaging is a powerful tool in nurturing your customer base and increasing the lifetime value of each customer.
Simple to Measure Success
Not only do customers and prospects enjoy getting your offers, the campaigns are easy to evaluate. You are quickly able to determine the successes and failures with easy to use analytics. This allows you to adjust your message, delivery time, title, etc… until you find the groove for your audience. Which leads to more profit and less time spent marketing to people who may not be interested in your product or service.
Automation is a Power Partner
Email automation is simply sending an email to a subscriber or group of subscribers based of some kind of triggered event. It could be welcome message, appointment reminder, birthday wishes, or something specific to your business. The beauty of automation is that you only have to create a message once and it will be sent at the appropriate time repeatedly with no effort on your part. Once again… saving you time to work on other areas of your business.
Key Takeaway
Email marketing is effective because prospects & customers are expecting your messages. Additionally, there are easy-to-use tools which allow you to maximize the value of your email list.
Why You Should Start Email Marketing
My first answer would be the $42-1 average ROI! But there are more reasons to start or revive your email campaign.
Professional Marketing Channel
To get things started, email is an accepted marketing channel used by businesses of all sizes. Customers expect offers and promotional email on a regular basis. Here’s a few interesting statistics.
- 80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention. (Emarsys, 2018)
- 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content.
- 73 percent of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email. (Adestra, 2016)
Compete With & Beat the Big Boys
At it’s heart email is inexpensive. Unlike Google Adwords or Facebook Ads… you don’t have to pay large amounts of money to get your product/service in front of potential buyers. There is no reason your campaigns cannot be more effective than companies like Domino’s Pizza or Orkin. Let them dominate the $7 per click market while you’re taking orders from satisfied customers and referrals.
Build Your Brand
For small businesses email is a powerful tool for building your brand, which results in more customers due to increased awareness. A consistent plan can lead to…
- Strengthening Customer Relationships
- Establishing Authority
- Increasing Customer Retention
Easy to Integrate Into Your Entire Business
Your email campaigns provide valuable insight to your customers. You’ll be able to see what kinds of subject lines they are interested in and the links they’ll click. This is all valuable information that you can use to improve your website messaging, direct mail, door hangers, commercials, etc…
Email is a great amplification tool as well. When it’s time to run specific promotions or in-store sales you’ll be sending a branded email to announce the sale and give the dates or hours.
Key Takeaway
Email is a professional marketing technique that’s within your budget guidelines. It’s easy to build into your business and will help you build your brand, which leads to more repeat customers and referrals.
How to Start Email Marketing
Getting started is easy. The key is to do some planning first, formulate a strategy to work towards and evaluate your efforts. Maybe you’ll strike gold on your first try, maybe you’ll need to adjust your efforts… either way you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t.
Define an Objective
What will be the focus of your email campaign? It could be a number of things, but for 95% of small businesses your objective will be brand awareness. This includes keeping customers and prospects up to speed about your products and services with weekly/monthly newsletters, then mixing in an occasional special offer or sale. Items to include:
- Upcoming events
- Unique content for you email list audience
- Recent blog posts
- Holiday wishes