How Email Marketing Can REALLY Boost Your Small Business

A portion of our clients use our optional monthly email marketing services to send out promotional emails and newsletters to their contact lists. Email marketing is an excellent way to get in front of your customers, but a lot of small business owners overlook this marketing method. Some hate ‘spam’ emails themselves, and don’t want to ‘punish’ their customers, and others don’t think it’s effective.

But email marketing can really, really boost your small business, no matter how small your contact list is (although a larger list is definitely more effective). Here’s how:

• Fewer barriers to entry. With email marketing, you’re sending targeted emails to people who signed up to receive them (if you’re growing your list correctly) and your audience has already shown interest in your content. They can read and engage without advertising that action to all of their friends (as Facebook would), and the email message feels more personal (especially if you use coding tools to make their first name show in the email).
• Audience is not exclusive. Some people use Facebook, others use Twitter, and some use other social networks or none at all. How do you reach more people, without having to maintain a page/profile on every single social network out there? Send them an email! Almost everybody uses email these days, and it doesn’t matter who their email provider is!
• Timing doesn’t matter as much. With Facebook, and Twitter especially, the timing of your marketing posts is critical. Once your post is published, it falls in the feed below more recent posts, in chronological order. Alternatively, your email stays marked in your customer’s email inbox until they see it. Good timing does matter, but it’s not the all-or-nothing battle you will find with social media marketing posts.
• Better conversion rates. When managed correctly, email marketing campaigns can boost your customer acquisition efforts approximately 40 more effectively than Facebook and Twitter!
• The most direct form of marketing. Probably one of the most powerful reasons for a small business to do email marketing is its more aggressive approach. A new blog post on your small business website is probably only read by the people who randomly come across it in search engines (you probably won’t gain a huge regular following). Posts on social media platforms have limited reach, and/or are restricted with limitations from the timing of publication. Even PPC and targeted advertising campaigns are passive – just because a potential customer sees (and clicks) the ad doesn’t guarantee or even strongly suggest that they will buy. Alternatively, an email marketing campaign goes straight to your customer’s inbox. It’s direct, and gets your brand in front of their eyes at the time you need them to remember you.

Since email marketing can really boost a small business, we make sure to include this option in every one of our digital marketing packages. We want to encourage small business owners to use every tool in our repertoire to reach their customers and grow their business!

Featured photo source: PicJumbo.com