Are you a small business stressing over whether to start emailing your contacts or not? You are in the right place as we are going to discuss email marketing, particularly in context to growing businesses. In this article, we will also try to understand how this channel comes handy when dealing with masses and the strategic benefits availed. If you are an aspiring company, buckle up to see ten reasons to send email messages to get the best results:
1. Email Marketing Is Easy to Start, Affordable, And Personal Medium of Communication
Getting started with email marketing is relatively simple for small businesses. They need to start using an email marketing platform like Mailchimp and begin with their existing email list. Also, it is free up to 2000 subscribers, thus lowering the entry bar. The 1:44 ROI also makes it even more attractive for smaller players who are already running on tight budgets.
Above all, people consider email as a private and trustworthy communication channel, even when compared to social media. Thus, as a small business, emailing your existing client base and referrals is a safe and rewarding strategy to begin with.
2. Email Campaigns Are Both Scalable and Measurable as An Outreach Tool
First of all you need to have a contact list. You can build one using Klean Leads that scrapes personal emails from any niche all around the world. Once you have a contact list, you can send out an email based on their interests, past interactions, region, time of day, activity, recent purchases, or as permutations and combinations of many such factors. Thus, you have complete control over the scale of your outreach efforts. You can channelize your activities around the progress levels in your sales funnel and monetize them efficiently with this one on one communication channel.
On the other hand, you can directly measure the outcomes of your communication drives with tons of metrics, including open rate, CTR, leads, conversions, and everything in between. Having access to these insights also aid in scaling the efforts according to the customer demographics.
3. Everybody Finds Emails Simple, And It Inspires Action
Every person using the internet has probably sent and received a lot of emails, making it one of the most common communication platforms. While you can send out only text messages, using pre-built or custom MailChimp templates allows you to build beautiful messages in very less time. You can embed relevant multimedia files, coupons, and referral links to the target audiences in a few easy steps.
All email copies are built around a call-to-action button. The message leads the readers into clicking the respective CTA, which could be buying your products/ services, subscribing to your activities, giving reviews, and visiting your website for special offers. This is a unique feature since engagement is always used to inspire action, unlike other channels that use engagement solely as a branding function.
4. Emails Reach Out to All Devices, Especially Mobiles
Online marketing in today’s world is mobile-first, but many domains like ecommerce still rely on computers for a considerable amount of their sales. Emails seem to fit excellently across all the devices and cater to great user experience for mobile devices too. This unparalleled visibility is among the fundamental reasons we recommend SMBs to focus on email marketing. 81% of the people read emails on their mobile phones as compared to 74% using computers.
To facilitate cross-device visibility, you need to use the responsive HTML templates and follow a few designing rules like keeping the breadth limited to 600 px. Most recipients read the messages on both their mobile phones and personal computers before taking any action. Mobile users are more likely to check their inboxes frequently. Have a look at the desktop and mobile version of this email:
5. Communicating Over Emails Builds Credibility and Long-Term Relationships
When it comes to building credibility, no channel is as effective as email marketing. For small businesses, this is a great opportunity to place themselves against bigger brands. Two factors strengthen your credibility here: personalization and consistency. Emails allow you to personalize the opening salutation, and with A/B Split testing, you can send the entire layout, subject lines, and color scheme that your contacts find more attractive. You can also filter the recipients as per their transactions and behavior to keep things interesting for them. Personalized messages receive 6x the transaction rates as compared to other ones. Personalization also ropes in $20 for every dollar invested.
Sending messages that your audience finds relevant on a personal basis consistently helps develop meaningful relationships. This becomes even easier for smaller firms since their employees/ owners personally know a large section of their audience, at least in the initial stages. These long-term relationships are instrumental in creating brand loyalty and repeat sales.
6. Emails Enable Targeted Marketing and Is Wanted by Your Customer Base
Segmentation is another email marketing feature that makes it practical and economical at the same time. You can segment your subscribers into various lists for running targeted campaigns. It allows you to add both personalization fields like product interest, open rate, hour of the day, email account signature and contact fields like first name, company, and job title. Hence, you can run a targeted campaign with minimal efforts and time.
A Marketing Sherpa survey finds that about 91% of the people want promotional messages delivered to their inboxes. Thus, your audience wanting to see you in their inbox at fixed intervals is enough motivation for reaching out to them. In this way, you can also ensure higher customer satisfaction and don’t end up contacting a customer who randomly bought your product two years ago.
7. Emails Also Generates Website Traffic, And They Are Shareable
You can generate website traffic directly proportional to your mailing list whenever required. Consider that you are going to attend an event in a particular city or launching a new product and have a relevant list of 30,000 people. If 10% of the total recipients land on your product page or the event, that’s a staggering 3000 people showing up. When compared to the costing, it is an extremely inexpensive and versatile solution.
Your recipients can easily share your messages to their contacts who find them relevant. Also, adding a referral code or coupons add the chances of your email going viral. Giving the link to gated content (lead magnets) is another way small companies can use to make the most out of the platform.
8. You Can Automate Email Marketing Extensively
Email marketing automation brings communication, consistency, and visibility under one umbrella. It allows you to send the following types of messages by setting up automation workflows:
- Welcome series
- Onboarding emails
- Customer discovery
- Newsletters
- Transactional messages
- Thank you emails
- Order confirmation and tracking messages
- Customer retention series and many more
Automating large portions of the workload at affordable prices is a great advantage since it also reduces the need for human resources. The BI reports give insights into optimizing the workflows and limit your scope to building the HTML email templates. You can pre-schedule these messages and set up automated responses with respect to your marketing campaigns and lead maturity. The open rate, click-to-open rate, and click-through rate for triggered messages are 46%, 24%, and 11%, respectively.
9. Small Businesses Can Achieve High ROI and Have Access to More Features with Email Marketing
As we mentioned earlier, it boasts an ROI of $44 for every dollar invested, making it a highly reliable channel. What makes it more attractive to small players is the vast range of features offered. You can embed images, GIFs, videos, opt-in forms, and many other things, including coupons. It also allows you to try multiple layouts, render messages, and test your emails for various parameters.
You can reach out for various purposes uniquely using these features. There are no restrictions to the copies, as in the case of other digital marketing channels. A McKinsey report finds them 40x better at client acquisition when compared to Facebook or Twitter.
10. Your Email Is Your Dedicated Communication Space Without Any Competing Entity
Did we just tell you that you can engage your customers and prospects alongside the big fishes? The even brighter side is that once they click through the message, it’s a private space for you and your readers. In the case of a Google search or Amazon listing, you have to compete along with every other brand out there. That is why it is best to consult an Amazon marketing agency, like Urtasker.com who can help you garner important impression share. This aspect is completely ruled out when emails are considered. Also, you are the owner of your data and need not rely on third-party analytics. It is a dedicated communication channel, and despite being a smaller firm, you can pitch your solutions without worrying about a competitor hovering over your copy.
Summing Up
We can agree to the fact that emails are incredibly effective, but what makes them a perfect match for small businesses is their omnipotent relevance. No matter how many channels or campaigns you run, they will play an essential role in integrating them. If you aren’t building your mailing list currently, start building one because it is an asset that will help you regardless of your budget or marketing channels. We hope that you find this article on the need for email marketing for small businesses useful in your future outreach ventures.
Image Credits: Onlineprinters, Really Good Emails, GetResponse
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