Why email marketing works
Guide for small business
Successful marketing is at the heart of any successful business. In order for a business to grow and become more profitable it needs to have a comprehensive marketing strategy.
Email marketing has long been the first choice for businesses of all shapes and sizes, from SME’s through to blue chip organisations. Email marketing is especially popular for small business, as it offers many sizable advantages to small companies that may have limited access to resources, marketing budget and time.
It is an easy way to reach your customers
Email marketing offers an easy to use and direct way to stay in contact with your customers. As consumers we are used to having access to our email 24/7, with research showing that 91% of us check out email every day.
196 billion emails are sent everyday by 4.3 billion email accounts. This figure continues to rise each year, with email marketing continuing to grow as the preferred method of contact. Not everyone is on social media – but 4.3 billion email accounts are active every single day.
Generally recipients choose not to delete their incoming mail once read; meaning your email marketing can remain inside your customers inboxes for months or even years. This gives email marketing a much longer shelf life verses traditional forms of marketing.
It requires no previous experience or technical expertise
Email marketing software will handle pretty much everything for you. From importing your mailing lists to creating fully automated decision based marketing; making it very easy to hit the ground running with no previous experience.
Email marketing software is also generally cloud based, this means that it is quick and easy to access and requires no technical expertise to install or configure.
Modern email marketing software will also contain a drag and drop design editor, often these will have lots of pro-designed email marketing templates. This means that you can quickly and easily theme one of these templates with your company branding, without having to employ the services of a graphic designer.
It helps to convert news prospects into customers
An email marketing campaign is a great way of turning prospects into customers. You can collect new contacts with a web signup form, this can be used on your website, your order form or social media. New contacts can enter their details to receive your newsletters & sales offers, used as part of a planned email marketing strategy, this is a great way to stay on the radar of your prospects, until they are ready to make a purchase.
The other advantage with using web sign up forms is that they create a proof of consent, this is required by GDPR; as an email marketer you are required to keep proof of each contact’s sign up.
Successful marketing is all about a steady drip feed of information, over time this builds a significant level of interest in your goods and services with your prospects.
It builds customer loyalty
Email marketing is a great way to build long term relationships with your contacts. It is very rare that a new contact will immediately take an interest in your products and make a purchase. Contacts like to feel that they know and can trust the seller before they have sufficient comfort enough to make a purchase.
If you are sending mailers that your contacts enjoy reading and find informative, then over time a relationship will develop, as trust is built.
This familiarity in the inbox is a great way of building loyalty and repeat sales also. As your contacts start to feel trust with your communications, this also builds a potential for repeat sales.
Loyal customers have a much shorter enquiry to purchase journey, this makes life much easier for a small business, as time and resources can be saved to deploy in other areas. Loyal customers are also much less likely to browser competitor websites for alternative deals.
It fits in well with other marketing channels
One of the most flexible marketing channels, fitting neatly with other methods in the mix:
- Social media:
Modern email marketing software will support full social media integration, this means that you can easily sync all channels to work alongside each other. For example, your email marketing software can automatically post a copy of your newsletter to your Twitter or Facebook feed.
This means that the reach of your email marketing is maximised as much as possible; broadcasting to your social media followers.
- Print design: Your digital marketing can also be supported by sending links to view, download or print your brochure. Using these marketing channels to support each other works really well. Often, people still like to see glossy design, you may sell products that are best presented with lots of images. Using email to offer printed media to contacts is an approach that works very well indeed.
- Pay Per Click:
If you use Google AdWords, Bing or similar then you can draw traffic to your web sign up forms. These forms can invite people to join your email marketing list to receive exclusive subscriber-based content.
Using Pay Par Click (PPC) to attract additional email subscribers works very well indeed. You can really broaden the reach of your email marketing by using PPC to attract new subscribers.
Email is the preferred method of contact
196 billion emails are sent everyday by 4.3 billion email accounts, this statistic continues to grow year on year.
We all have smart phones and tablets and have access to emails almost 24/7; using email to help us run our busy lives.
Email is one of the only channels that we use for both business and personal communication in equal balance. We send and receive everything by email, from food orders, financial correspondence, organising social events and communicating with co-workers.
This means that most of us run our lives with a big helping hand from email, making it our first choice for updates on pretty much every aspect of our lives.
