Email marketing is an old trend that no one uses anymore, right?
Right?!?
Let me ask you this, did you check your email today? Ok then, does that sound like email is dead?
It’s not. Check this out:
“The number of global e-mail users is set to grow to 4.6 billion users in 2025.”
Number of e-mail users worldwide 2025 | Statista
If you’d like to skip out on more than four and a half billion customers, then you might want to rethink if you’d like to be a business owner.
If you want to make money, then keep reading about the benefits of email marketing for small business.
Why Email Marketing Is Important For Business
You probably put a ton of money and effort into your website and social media, but you might be overlooking this other awesome channel. If you want to know why email marketing is important for business, we have you covered. Just think about these reasons. It’s:
- Affordable
- Targeted
- Measurable
- Keeps your brand in front of your customers
The cost is very low, so the return on investment is way higher than many other marketing strategies.
You can reach your customers, you can give them what you want, and it’s a minimal effort and cost.
Why Email Marketing Is Important For Small Business
Great, big businesses (with all their resources) love it. But what about the smaller ones?
That’s what’s so awesome. It’s easy! Whether you engage a marketing agency (ahem, we can help) or try to do it yourself, the prices are low! Here are a lot of reasons why email marketing is important for small business.
Advantages to Email Marketing
No matter the size of your business, here are a bunch of advantages to email marketing as a part of your strategy:
Marketing For All Budgets
Email marketing can be very affordable if you’re on a tight budget. And let’s face it, most small businesses are. But many of the common services charge based on how many emails you send, so it isn’t a lot if you aren’t sending to everyone.
And more good news is that your email list has to be people who have signed up, so you’re talking to people who should be interested for one reason or another.
Speak To Everyone, Individually
It’s also very easy to segment lists into different versions, and that allows you to give the appropriate message to the appropriate person.
If you send one email to everyone on your list, you’re doing it wrong.
Think about the difference between people who have been loyal customers for years, and compare them to someone that has just signed up and never made a purchase from you. Those two groups have massively different views of your company, so the same messaging won’t work. The best case scenario is that only one group would respond well, and the worst case is that neither of them like it.
Read It When They Need It
Another one of the benefits of email marketing for small business that differs from social media, digital ads, or many online channels is where the messages live. The emails live in the email box of customers, and those messages sit there until the user takes action. They don’t get pushed away by some algorithm if the person scrolls by, and they don’t miss it just because they didn’t check their phone every 22 seconds of the entire day.
Schedules That Stay On Schedule
You can also take advantage of scheduling. Did someone leave something in a cart? Send them an email a few days later. Do your customers generally get their haircut from you once a month? Send them a message 25 days after the last one to remind them.
There are plenty of other ways to take advantage of this. Just think about:
- Sending a message when a sale starts
- Reminding that a sale is about to end
- Announce a new product or service offering as soon as it comes out
- Nudge customers to register for an event before the sign-up closes
- Send a special discount on their birthday
With so many options, you can uniquely follow up on an individual basis in a way that makes it sound like you really care.
Keep The Relationship Alive
Speaking of scheduling, people like to buy from companies they have a relationship with. If they see your messages popping up in their inbox on occasion, you’ll be in the back of their mind. It doesn’t even matter if they open them!
Measuring the Results
Emails are easy peasy to track. Many companies like direct mail, but there’s no way to tell how many of those go directly into the IRL trashcan (or recycle bin, if you’re potential clients aren’t barbarians).
You can see who opened it, when they opened it, what kind of device they opened it on, how often they opened it, what they clicked on, and a lot more. And with the right tracking parameters, you’ll even know what they did on your website.
Knowing how to analyze all that info is a different story, but it’s a very fun challenge to take on!
Some Words Of Warning About Email Marketing
This is all great news, but you should be aware that email marketing is a heavily-regulated area. You’ll want to take some necessary precautions to make sure you don’t get yourself into trouble.
But don’t worry! These are pretty easy steps, and they limit actual scammers so that your messaging stands out better!
Make Sure Users Opt-In
People on your email list need to confirm that they actually want to be there. You need to have a clear process for doing this that ensures users know they are signing up. Also, be sure to document when, how, and why they signed up.
Let Them Unsubscribe
It’s a requirement in countries around the world that you provide an easy way for readers to unsubscribe from the email list. The most common way to do this is to put a link in the footer of the email, and make it very clear that they can click it when they want to unsubscribe.
Unsubscribe Them When They Unsubscribe
Have you ever clicked “unsubscribe” and the massive amount of emails just keep coming? I have, and let me tell you, it didn’t give me a favorable impression of the brand.
Plus, your main goal here is to avoid people clicking that scary “mark as spam” button, because enough of those will get you blocked from sending emails to a lot of people.
One fancy way to go about it is to give people the option to change how often they want emails, but that usually requires a pretty fancy setup.
So don’t overthink it. But make sure that if someone unsubscribes, you don’t send them any other emails.
Provide Them With Your Contact Info
One last thing that’s super important is to make sure you have plenty of contact info and links in your messages. This has two benefits:
- Meet legal requirements to identify yourself, and allow people to contact you if they have an issue with what you send.
- Build your brand, and give customers the chance to buy from you!
Basically, don’t overlook the obvious branding opportunity here.
Email Marketing Is Totally Worth It
The bottom line here is that you should be taking advantage of this marketing channel. There are tons of benefits of email marketing for small business, and it’s affordable and easy to get started.If you’re not sure how to go about it, we would be happy to help.
