Is email marketing good for small businesses? The answer is an unequivocal “yes!” Email marketing is one of the best tools for small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and there are a lot of reasons why small business owners rely on email marketing campaigns to sell their products and services, build customer relationships, and keep customers in the loop.
Need more proof? In this blog, we’ll take a look at the top 7 reasons email marketing is so useful for small business owners. Read on, and see why you should be investing in an email marketing strategy for your company.
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Reasons why Email Marketing is effective on small Businesses
1. There Are Lots Of Different Types Of Emails Small Businesses Can Use
One great thing about email marketing is that it’s very versatile and flexible, and there are a lot of ways to use it to increase sales, connect with customers, and provide value. Here are just a few of the most common types of email templates used by small businesses in Australia and worldwide.
- Welcome emails – You’ll usually send a welcome email when someone signs up for your newsletter or mailing list. These have a very high open rate of up to 91%, so they’re a great way to provide new customers with more information about your business.
- Email newsletters – Email newsletters are a fantastic way to share valuable information with your customers. For example, if you run a plumbing company in New South Wales, you could send out an email newsletter about the most common causes of leaks in homes. This information is useful for customers, and helps position your business as an industry expert.
- Transactional emails – Transactional emails are related to specific transactions, like a customer booking an appointment, buying an item, making a payment, or taking some other such action. Transactional emails have an 8x higher open rate compared to other types of emails, making them a very useful tool.
- Cart abandonment emails – Cart abandonment occurs when a customer leaves a website without making a purchase. Email tools can be used to send a reminder to the customer about their purchase, making it more likely that they will complete the purchase. About 10% of people will complete their purchase after receiving a cart abandonment email with a call-to-action.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many ways to send emails and reach your customers that we couldn’t possibly list them all in one place! But no matter what you may do at your small business, there are email templates and tools that will help you appeal to more customers and increase sales.
2. Modern Email Marketing Tools Make Email Marketing Campaigns Easier Than Ever
There are a lot of different email builders out there, often integrated into Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software like HubSpot. These tools let you send emails quickly and use templates to build interactive, beautiful, and eye-catching emails for your customers with effective subject lines, professional images, and unique, mobile-friendly designs.
Thanks to modern email marketing services and tools, you can put together emails in just a few minutes with no technical skills – and send them to your entire email list at once, or create multiple lists of users for market segmentation purposes.
3. Email Marketing Is Extremely Cost-Effective
Email marketing is more cost-effective than almost any kind of other marketing, such as social media marketing, PPC marketing with tools like Google Adwords, and other traditional methods of marketing. It’s estimated that the average ROI (Return On Investment) for email marketing is $42 per $1 spent. That’s an ROI of 4200%, which is actually incredible.
But what does that mean in real life? Well, let’s compare this to the average ROI of a marketing campaign based on physical mail. A study of Australian mailing campaigns found that physical mailing campaigns have an ROI of just 27%. Now, this is still pretty good – especially because physical mail may be able to reach more customers more quickly – but it still pales in comparison to the incredible ROI of email marketing.
4. Emails Reach Customers On All Of Their Devices
You may think that people only check their emails on devices like laptops and desktops, but you’d be wrong. While this was the case in the past, mobile devices are now very popular for opening and reading emails – so, just like social media marketing, you can use emails to reach customers while they’re on-the-go.
Mobile now accounts for 46% of all email opens, and 35% of business professionals check their email on mobile devices. This is why it’s so important to create emails that can be read on both desktop environments like Windows and macOS web browsers, as well as on mobile phones like iOS and Android devices. If your email works on only desktop – or only mobile – you’re missing out on reaching a lot of people.
5. Email Marketing Lets You Reach Specific Audiences
If you use modern email marketing and CRM tools, it’s easy to “segment” your audience. Market segmentation means breaking your customers’ email addresses into different categories – and sending unique emails to each one. For example, you could:
- Send follow-up emails to people who visited your website and signed up, but did not purchase your products or services.
- Send a reminder to a previous customer. For example, if you run an oil change shop, you could send appointment reminders to customers every six months to get them to come back.
- Send an email to a customer who has purchased your items in the past, offering them a discount on their next purchase.
- Send an email to your most loyal customers allowing them to join a referral program and earn discounts or cash by referring you to their friends, family, and colleagues.
Using market segmentation to split up specific audiences can increase click-through rates and ROI dramatically, improving the overall effectiveness of your small business email marketing campaign.
6. You Can Track Engagement, Click-Through Rates & More With Email Marketing
One of the best things about email marketing tools is that they let you keep track of a lot of different statistics related to your email performance. Depending on the tools you use, you may be able to track things such as:
- Open rate, which refers to the percentage of people who opened the email
- Click-through rate (CTR), which is the percentage of people who
- clicked on a specific call-to-action (CTA) within the email
- The number of times the email was opened
- The total time spent viewing the email
- The IP address and country of the people subscribing to your emails
And much more. With the right software on your side, it’s easy to see how your email campaigns are performing – and to find ways to improve them.
7. Email Marketing Campaigns Work Well With Other Marketing Efforts
Email marketing campaigns are especially great when you combine them with other marketing efforts. There are a lot of different ways you can do this.
For example, you can combine emails with content marketing. You can use emails as a way to send customers your latest blog articles, vlogs, podcasts, and other content marketing efforts. This provides them with value, and helps you get more clicks and views on the content your company is producing. This, in turn, can help with SEO and build a more authoritative brand.
Or, you could use emails to promote your social media presence – sharing your Facebook and Instagram posts, sharing stories from previous customers, or offering customers a discount or coupon if they sign up and follow you on major social media websites.
You can also combine email marketing with physical mail, flyers, radio ads – the opportunities are truly limitless, particularly if you’re working with an experienced marketing agency.
Not Sure Where To Start? Contact Australian Internet Advertising Today!
Email marketing is an extremely powerful tool for small business owners in Australia. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed and you’re not sure where to start, don’t despair! Australian Internet Advertising is here for you.
We offer a variety of digital marketing services throughout Australia, including email marketing. We’re experts in the subject – and we can help you build an effective email marketing strategy that will boost profits and help you build your business. So don’t wait. Contact us online or give us a call at 1300 304 640 to get started today.
