Email marketing is an older strategy in the realm of digital marketing, so some marketers have the tendency to underestimate it. The truth is, email marketing hasn’t lost any effectiveness over the years, and in some ways, it’s become even more effective.
According to Sapper Consulting, email marketing for small businesses remains one of the highest-ROI strategies you can implement for raising brand visibility, improving your brand reputation, generating more traffic, and even landing more sales. But why is it so powerful, especially in the face of other modern marketing and advertising strategies?
1. Practically Infinite Reach
For starters, almost everyone uses email. Most of us have multiple email addresses, allowing us to work professionally and communicate with friends and family in different channels. It’s also relatively easy to get ahold of these email addresses, making it trivial to expand your reach. Few services like Klean Leads should do this kind of work for you if you at least have their name.
Even if you’re starting with nothing and your budget is limited, you can put together an email list of hundreds or thousands of addresses within the first few weeks of your operation.
If you’re aggressive in how you grow and your email offers plenty of value and content to your recipients, you could eventually scale to reach millions of people with your emails; there’s no upper limit to how far you can grow.
2. Instant Communication
It’s also helpful that email is sent instantaneously. When you hit the send button, your recipients will all receive your intended message in under a second (assuming your server is functioning correctly). That makes email ideal for advertising lightning sales, issuing retractions, providing emergency instructions, and notifying your recipients of important news.
You can also take advantage of this to tease future announcements and encourage more interactions from your recipients. For example, you could have a countdown timer on your site counting down to an important announcement you’ll make exclusively through email.
3. Incredibly Low Costs
One of the biggest benefits of this marketing for small businesses is its high return on investment (ROI). In other words, practitioners of email marketing tend to make a lot more money than they put into the strategy. This is partial because this marketing is effective, but it’s also because the costs are so incredibly low.
There are dozens of online tools that allow you to assemble email lists and distribute emails for free. You can also rely on templates and automated patterns to minimize manual effort. Compared to other forms of marketing and advertising, it’s very cheap.
4. Ongoing Follow-Ups and Continuous Opportunities
Let’s say you send a marketing email to a prospect it doesn’t interact with it at all; they don’t even open the message before deleting it. Is this a lost opportunity?
The short answer is no. In fact, many email marketing experts have found that it takes many follow-up messages before the average person responds or takes action. And thanks to the format of email marketing, it’s trivially easy to send follow-up messages.
The more persistent you are in trying to convert people (assuming they’re a good fit for your brand), the better your payoff will be. On top of that, you can use email to keep reaching out to your most consistent customers. That means each subscriber on your list represents multiple opportunities.
5. Potential for Automation
It is one of the best marketing strategies to utilize automation. Once you set up a template and an email drip pattern, your email automation software can take care of the rest. You don’t have to manually sort through your own list, nor do you have to send out every single email by hand.
Instead, you’ll set all the parameters upfront, and you’ll rely on sophisticated algorithms to take care of the execution of your vision. This saves a ton of time, freeing you to focus on other marketing efforts or lowering your costs.
6. Measurement and Tracking
Email is also beloved because it makes it easy to measure and track your results. As long as you’re using the right email marketing software, you should have access to tons of metrics, like open rate, conversion rate, and even how long your recipients spend reading your email.
The more you learn about how your tactics perform, the better you’ll be able to improve them; and as long as you’re willing to continue experimenting and measuring, you’ll keep getting better results.
7. Long-Term Growth Potential
Email marketing benefits from nearly infinite long-term growth potential. Over time, your strategy has the power to get better and better, ultimately boosting your ROI further and further, and in multiple different ways.
For example, as you spend more time issuing new content, advertising to new customers, and boosting your company’s reach, you’ll naturally attract more people to your email subscriber list.
The more people you’re emailing, on average, the more effective your email blasts are going to be. You’ll also get to know your audience members better as you interact with them more frequently, and you can target people specifically and appropriate with the content you create.
On top of that, if you experiment consistently, you’ll gradually learn new things about your readers and about the effectiveness of various other tactics. You’ll find out the strategies that work and the strategies that don’t – and you can fine-tune your email approach until you get the best possible results for your niche.
8. Integration With Other Tactics
Finally, it has great synergy with a variety of other marketing tactics. You can use it to cross-promote your social media activity, distribute your content, and take full advantage of higher SEO rankings. The possibilities are limitless.
With these advantages identified, it’s easy to see why email marketing remains valuable for small business owners. It’s hard to declare it the “best” approach to digital marketing since every business will have different needs and different priorities, but it’s certainly one of the best tactics you can add to your sales and marketing arsenal.
If you’re not already investing in email marketing, now is the time to get started.
