Top 6 Benefits of Small Business Email Marketing

Small business marketing can sometimes feel like a game of whack-a-mole. With so many platforms and channels to choose from, it can be difficult to know where—and how often—to promote your business.

Fortunately, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective small business marketing strategies available. If done well, email marketing can potentially return far more investment than what’s put in.

In fact, the ROI on email marketing is among the highest of any digital marketing channel and can range from 20 to 2000 percent or even higher for some businesses. Here are the top 6 benefits of small business email marketing;

Increase brand awareness

Building on the last point, email marketing is an excellent vehicle for growing your brand awareness.

Emails can be tailored to your target audience’s interests, so you can find the best way to introduce yourself to new people.

You can also send people any type of content you want—from links to useful blog posts to sales pages—and they’ll be more likely to engage with it in their inboxes than they would anywhere else online.

An added benefit of brand awareness is that it can help you stay top-of-mind for your current customers.

If you send emails that are interesting enough to engage prospects, they’ll likely pass on that engagement to their peers. When you’re already communicating with your customers, this works to your advantage.

Increase customer engagement

Engaging your email list members can help you increase customer engagement, especially if you have a transactional email system in place.

When you add a transactional email system to your marketing strategy, you can send out emails related to a specific type of customer interaction, like a receipt confirmation or an order confirmation.

These emails can also be customized and contain links to other materials that are helpful for that specific customer. By increasing customer engagement with automated emails, you can drive more value out of every customer that interacts with your brand.

You can also help customers become more familiar with your business and its offerings.

Help you conduct market research

Another excellent way to use email marketing is to poll your existing customer base. You can do this by sending out a survey to your email list.

The survey should be short and sweet—people tend to be more interested in getting their emails quickly than in taking long surveys—and it should ask for their input on your products and services.

The insights you glean from these surveys can be hugely valuable for improving your business. You can also use email marketing to send coupons or other special offers to your customer base. You may want to do this in order to collect data from your customers, or you may want to do this to increase your sales.

Whatever your specific goals are, email offers can be a valuable way to help you better understand your customers and increase your sales.

Offer lead generation opportunities

Email marketing can also be a great way to generate leads, especially when you’re first starting out.

It’s important to keep in mind that you can’t directly sell to your email list members—this is against most email marketing providers’ terms of service—but that doesn’t mean you can’t still bring value to them. By offering useful content, you can create opportunities for your email list members to convert to leads. If you want to take this to the next level, you can also include a call-to-action button (CTA) in the footer of every email you send out.

This is usually a link that takes the reader to a page on your website, where they can sign up to receive more information about what you have to offer.

Offer lead qualification capabilities

If you’re not able to convert every single person who takes advantage of your offer into a paying customer, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed—it just means you’re human.

Email marketing also provides a great way to filter out the people who aren’t a good fit for your products and services before they become customers.

You can do this by asking people to provide additional information when they click through your CTA. For example, if you’re selling a product that costs more than $100, you can ask people to provide their email addresses, names, and phone numbers.

This gives you the opportunity to follow up with these people and ask them more questions about their needs. If they don’t qualify as customers, you can simply ignore their information and move on.

This is a huge advantage over other marketing channels like social media, where there’s no way for you to filter out unqualified leads.

Show you what works (and what doesn’t)

Email marketing allows you to try new things and experiment with new offers, new CTAs, new sales techniques, and new types of content.

This is an important part of growing your company, as you’ll never know what works best unless you try it out.

With email marketing, it’s easy to test out new ideas and see which ones get the best results.

If a particular type of content does well or a special offer brings in more customers than usual, you can increase the frequency with which you use it.

On the other hand, if you try something new and it doesn’t bring in any new customers, you’ll know to cut it out of your marketing strategy.

Testing new things is important, especially when you’re first starting out.