Small businesses can benefit enormously from email marketing but many are still not using it, or not using it to its full advantage. Here we explore 10 benefits of email marketing for small businesses.
- A targeted, direct way to contact your subscribers
Email marketing allows small businesses to cheaply and easily communicate directly with subscribers (Including current and previous customers as well as prospects) with relevant targeted communications.
- Build a relationship with your database.
Small businesses can use email marketing to target subscribers at different stages of the lifecycle, offering a direct way to build a relationship with your database and inform them about your business and products.
- Prompt sales from new customers, encourage repeat purchases, increase sales conversion and up-sell/cross-sell other products or services.
Email Marketing allows you to highlight your key products, services and offers and drive targeted traffic back to your website to convert. Using the technology available a series of automated campaigns can even be created to optimise conversions and send emails about related products or services based on previous purchase and behavioural data.
You could even use email marketing to highlight location specific offers and drive people offline to your shop!
- Increase brand awareness, keep your brand fresh in your subscribers minds and drive targeted traffic to your website.
By regularly communicating with subscribers via email you are keeping your brand fresh in their mind and offering them valuable content so that when they do require your product or service, you are first in their mind.
- Trackable, measurable results from campaigns.
Online marketing in general offers a highly measurable form of marketing with statistics available to delve into every part of what happened during your campaign, when it happened and how often it happened. By using all the data available campaign can be monitored, tested and optimised to ensure the highest result possible is achieved.
- Fast delivery allowing you to reach customers quickly with offers and information.
Email marketing is perfect for communicating with customers for limited time or availability offers. Where direct mail can take days to deliver to subscribers, email marketing technologies can deliver your emails to thousands (and in some cases millions) of subscribers within minutes.
- High ROI
In 2014, email marketing brought in £24.93 for every £1 spent on it, according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). So why would you not want to use the marketing channel that offers the most bang for your buck when used well?
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- Catch people on the move consuming email on their mobile devices.
More and more subscribers are opening their email on mobile devices as can be seen from this chart by Return Path.
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Mobile. Webmail, Desktops: Where are we viewing email now? Return Path Inc, 2011
This gives an increased opportunity for interaction with your emails, but does mean that the design of your emails needs to be considered closely to provide for this increasing trend.
- Personalise communications using the data collected in your database.
By using the data you have collected about your subscribers and additional purchase and behavioural data from within your business, you can send highly personalised emails. Not just using their name, but going further to personalise based on specific information related to their relationship with your business. This could be information such as previous purchases they have made, products they have looked at, when they have abandoned their shopping basket online, when they last logged into your site and much more.
- Gain feedback from your customers
Email marketing offers a direct and fast route to gain feedback from your customers and subscribers by continuously monitoring, testing and optimising your campaigns based on previous results.
Product reviews can be directly asked for through your emails, as well as giving you the opportunity to deliver online surveys to subscribers and increase the amount of data you hold about them; enabling you to personalise your campaigns further with this information in the future.
Post written by Kate Barrett of Shine a Light Media.
Kate has over 10 years experience working directly on client email marketing programs, she have a proven track record of increasing results; from opens and clicks to conversions. Speaking, blogging, research and DMA membership mean that she is always up to date with the latest email marketing news to feed her passion!
Kate is helping the Goal Setting Collective work on the goal of building their list this month – why not join the collective so you can benefit from what she has to say?