Email marketing for small business if done the right way can attract new customers to help establish itself amid more prominent players almost instantly.
Every business needs customers regularly. Email marketing helps reach any business to its potential customers on a consistent and regular basis without much human efforts which make email marketing unavoidable for any business, including small businesses.
When the business is small and new, it is tough to find email subscribers. However, that shouldn’t indulge you in buying a readymade list of emails believing it to be genuine. If those emails were any worth, they might not be available for sale. On top of that, if you are blasting emails to unknown people, you are doing more bad than good to your reputation and risking all your future emails end up in spam folder.
Apart from making sure each of your email subscribers has opted in to receive your emails, at times user change their preferences, so make sure each email contains a one-click Unsubscribe option as well.
Let’s find out how email marketing can work for a small business like yours.
Why Small Businesses Should Use Email Marketing
So once you are genuinely building a list of interested subscribers for your emails, here are 21 reasons why email marketing is a must for any small business. It should be part of any online businesses marketing efforts.
1. Builds a Trust Factor
We like to do business with whom they trust. Email builds a business’s credibility and increases the trust factor.
But how does email build trust?
By sharing helpful and related information!
Building trust isn’t something one can do in a day or two. It gradually develops over time.
2. Get More Sales / Calls
Email can help connect the right customer with the right business at the right time with the right offer.
An AC repairing service business in burning summer drops an email to its readers for discounted services can connect and get more sales from the existing audience.
If one sends a well-timed and well-crafted email, it is naturally going to get more sales. Even I prefer to send emails to clients and enhance my freelancing revenue.
3. Enhance Customer Relationship
Email is the cheapest and yet very useful tool to keep in touch with clients who are the bread and butter for a business. Effective communication can enhance the customer relationship.
A critical update or a personal note can help customer realizes they aren’t merely a name on an email list. They feel valued and empowered.
Make sure you aren’t sending them too frequent updates as that can annoy them. Everyone is busy and so don’t want to be seeing your update every week or so. Once in a while is okay.
4. Build a Brand
Unique content and great design can help build a brand using emails. It can escalate a small business with more customers.
Email can help garner more customers, but it can also help reach more customers when the email is shared along. The sharing won’t happen if an email is of no value to the subscribers.
Building a brand with email is easy, and all one needs to be doing is to provide useful emails that offer good value to the readers. Keep the content unique and have a great design to
5. Measurable
Email marketing efforts are highly measurable. In an email, you can quickly know who all customers bought a particular product. Hence, one knows everything about what’s working and what’s not in an email marketing campaign.
Using advanced email automation tools, one can dig deep into web traffic, click through links, email open-rates, website interaction, and much more. In short, it helps in devising a smart and result oriented email campaign.
6. Starts Driving Results Immediately
Sending a marketing email to a list of customers is easy, all thanks to top email automation tools. One can immediately begin to within few minutes without intense technical know-how.
These automation tools have everything that one needs to know in the beginning to get an instant start. Moreover, there are dedicated customer support staff to help.
Even when you don’t have too many subscribers, you can build a few from your friends on social media to jump on to your site and ask them to subscribe if they find useful.
7. Reach Customers on Every Device
People may not use social media or search on every possible device, but they use email everywhere. Wherever your customers are, you can connect with them via email.
It is vital to focus on mobile devices due to its growing popularity. They browse, chat, send, receive, and do all sort of activities 24×7.
8. Ready-to-Use Email Templates
The email automation tools like AWeber or GetResponse provide readymade email templates with easy edit in a drag and drop editor. Designing a professional email newsletter that looks perfect on every possible device, including desktop, tablet, and mobile is a breeze using templates.
All one needs to be doing is to change the content and images. Every email can look the same and make it looks professional. Hence, email templates can make a big difference with minimum effort.
9. Boost Web Traffic
It’s plain and simple – website traffic is the lifeline of an online business.
Email works. It elevates the web traffic to pour in more people to see what you are offering.
As and when you email readers, you are bound to get people to come back to your site.
No points for guessing when I email my blog subscribers.
10. Can Offer Lead Magnet
Everyone who lands on your website won’t be willing to stick their wallet out and ready to buy what you have to offer.
Offer them an incentive to subscribe with a lead magnet. A lead magnet can be a free eBook or a discount coupon code or anything that can help you convince them to be a subscriber.
Email marketing allows you to nurture a lead and over time, convert them into paying customers.
People skip and scan before buying. They take their time to educate themselves about the product or service.
11. Allow a 2-Way Conversation
You don’t need to send emails from noreply@yourdomain email. You can make emails for even marketing be sent from your email so your future customers can directly initiate a 2way conversation.
Emails can help a 2-way conversation. Encouraging readers to participate in feedback via the email can start a meaningful conversation.
12. Cost-effective Promotions
Your business is a small fish; the market is a deep ocean with killer sharks (big companies). It won’t be easy to stand out in such a furious competition where already these giant sharks have acquired a significant share.
Solution?
Sending emails doesn’t cost a fortune, and yet it is a very effective way to promote businesses to the prospects who are already getting emails from you and know about your product or services.
On top of that, if you have a list of customers for one product, it becomes elementary for you to refer them to other products and instantly get some sales flowing.
13. Email Marketing is Fully Automated
Email marketing is time-saving, professional, easy, and result oriented.
But the best part is – the whole process can be fully automated.
Online email marketing tools make all the task hassle-free.
You can set up rules like when a user subscribes send them the lead magnet and a series of emails. Later it can be set, so emails go out on a different time or depending on their choice of topics, only send them emails from those topics. So on and so forth.
Like if you subscribe to my ebook download, immediately get the ebook and then a series of emails come to you. Later you will get regular updates from my blog. All this can be done without me even need to lift a finger.
So businesses can automate the email marketing process and focus on doing what they do best – build their business.
14. Get More Reach
Each email is delivering in your subscribers’ inbox. Depending on how memorable the subject lines are, they can mean if they will open it or not.
Now the same updates shared over social media will not reach as many people as email.
So social media marketing should be part of marketing; email is something that should be part of the strategy as well. No business can flourish only with social media or search engine marketing and without email marketing.
In the age of Whatsapp and Snapchat, people still like to use emails. Though most social network now allows sign up via phone, email is one of the critical media of social media sites to update users about the latest updates.
An email hasn’t lost its charm. It’s an exciting and innovative way to build & maintain customer relationships.
