Despite the proliferation of various digital communication channels and content formats, email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing strategies for businesses, regardless of size. With a low barrier for entry, email marketing can be especially beneficial for smaller enterprises with limited to non-existent marketing budgets.
If you’re looking for a cost-effective strategy to grow your business, keep reading to learn how an effective email campaign can help fill marketing gaps and achieve your goals.
What Can Email Marketing Do for Your Business?
Email marketing is an excellent way to promote products and services while engaging with your customer base. Unlike other platforms like social media, where you’re constantly competing for audiences’ attention and navigating changing algorithms to get your content in front of eyeballs, email delivers it right to their inbox. What’s more, recipients chose to give you their email addresses, which means an expressed interest in your brand.
Here are some of the things you can do with email marketing:
- Build customer relationships: For example, after a purchase, you can send a blog post or video showing the best use cases for your product.
- Nurture leads: Sending prospects content that addresses their pain points can help nudge them to a purchase. For instance, an automotive shop can send tips for maintaining engine health.
- Improve customer retention: Email allows you to regularly re-engage customers with relevant content or product recommendations based on their previous actions and purchases.
- Drive traffic and sales: This can involve notifying subscribers of new blog posts, seasonal sales, or product releases.
- Get customer feedback: Email is a great platform for asking customers’ feedback and reviews. These can be vital to improving your products, services, and marketing efforts.
Regardless of what stage you are in your business journey, a sound email marketing strategy is a powerful tool for achieving your goals and cultivating lasting relationships with customers.
Benefits of Email Marketing
Before diving into this section, it’s worth noting that investing in an email campaign doesn’t mean choosing it over social media and other digital marketing strategies. Instead, it’s about growing your marketing stack and leveraging each communication channel’s strength.
With that said, here are the primary advantages of email marketing:
Scalability
Whether you’re a mom-and-pop shop or a multinational corporation, you can adjust your email marketing strategy to align with your goals and resources. Email marketing services offer tiered pricing that allows you to pay only for what you need.
For instance, a basic plan might only offer scheduling and testing tools, while a premium plan provides personalisation, optimisation, and enhanced automation features. This scalability allows you to learn as you go and get more tools when you begin to see results.
Direct line to customers
Hilarious TikTok videos and aesthetic Instagram posts are great, but if algorithms don’t show them to your target audience, their potential impact is severely compromised. With email, you have consent to send content straight to your subscribers’ inboxes.
This direct access allows you to do the following:
- Build trust and cultivate relationships
- Establish expertise and credibility
- Keep your brand top of mind
- Repurpose existing content strategies
With email marketing, you have full control over a communication channel. This lets you stick with a content strategy without being sidetracked by pesky algorithm changes.
Personalised content
Personalisation doesn’t end with addressing recipients by their first names. This practice entails using subscribers’ data to craft content relevant to their interests and needs. You can personalise content based on data such as the following:
- Web and product pages viewed
- Social ads and posts engaged with
- Email links clicked
- Location
- Past purchases
For instance, a brewery might send a video recap of a recent beer festival held near the subscriber’s area. This can entice the recipient to attend the next one or stir cravings for their favourite IPA. When you send content that subscribers consistently find valuable, it increases engagement, clicks, and ultimately, conversions.
Automated campaigns
Email services can implement automated sequences based on subscriber data and actions. This is what occurs when you receive a welcome email after signing up for a service or tracking information after purchasing.
Other examples of these automated sequences include the following:
- Onboarding: This sends a series of emails to new customers, providing informative content about the company, its products and services, and other valuable content that can optimise user experience.
- Retargeting: These can involve cart abandonment emails sent to customers with special incentives (like free shipping) if they complete the purchase. This can also entail re-engaging customers who haven’t purchased after a certain period.
- Lead nurturing: This sequence sends a series of emails designed to convert leads into paying customers. This typically involves content relevant to where the recipients are in their customer journey.
Email platforms allow you to design various automated sequences for each marketing goal. This lets you consistently engage subscribers with relevant content and minimal effort.
Cost-effectiveness and efficiency
Marketers have long praised email for having one of the highest returns on investment (ROI) among marketing channels, earning businesses up to USD$40 for every USD$1 spent.
Here are other reasons that make email marketing an efficient strategy:
- Multi-purpose: One email campaign can serve different objectives, be it brand awareness, sales promotion, or customer retention. This versatility lets businesses get more value out of the email marketing spend.
- Long-term benefits: Once you build a strong email list, you have an established audience that you can market to over the long term at no additional cost. As you continue to build relationships with your subscribers, you can encourage brand loyalty and increase conversion rates.
And when you factor in its low barrier for entry, scalability, and low operating costs, email becomes a truly enticing marketing strategy.
Final words
With its unique blend of reach, engagement, and conversion capabilities, incorporating an email marketing strategy is essential for modern businesses. If you’re looking to expand your marketing efforts, take stock of your business goals and identify which areas email marketing can aid your business.