As one of the more original forms of digital marketing, email marketing has been tried and tested for many years. Since it is an older form, we are more familiar with how email marketing works, what needs to be done to build your list, send an effective email, and delight your customers afterwards. Small businesses usually have a very close relationship with many customers, making it more important for them to engage with customers. Keeping them updated, informed, and aware of your brand or any news relating to it keeps them satisfied and more likely to come back. The benefits below are just some of the ones we have experienced in our time working with small businesses.
1.Strengthen Relationships
Like we mentioned, many consumers value their relationships with the owner of a local hardware store or doctors office. Keep it personal by strengthening these relationships with email marketing.
2. Learn What Works
Other platforms also have analytics that can help you figure out what entices your customers, but email analytics are some of the most helpful. Being able to see the unsubscribes (literally a list of people not interested in your brand/content), the amount of people that bothered to open the email, and then click on a link is great.
3. Increase Website Traffic
Oh yeah, and those clicks? Can help you drive more traffic and users to your website, something we all want to do. Whether it be to a specific product or to a landing page for a service, use these clicks to send users to the site and give them what they are looking for.
4. Promote Services or Products
Does your small business have a lot of different offerings that people may not be familiar with? Promote them through an email sent to your customers who already use your other products; these lesser known ones might be what they’ve wanted all along!
5. Stay Organized
Excel spreadsheets, customer management systems, or *shudder* a lengthy list of phone contacts isn’t the best way to store customer information. Using your email platform, you can store a lot more than just email; name, phone number, address, and more. Email platforms are the management systems of the future.
6. Save Time
Using an efficient, professional email marketing tool can save you a lot of time and hassle down the road. Once you create templates for each of the types of emails you regularly send, plugging in the info and sending it along has never been easier.
7. Build Your List
We discussed how hard it can be to manage your list, but how do you grow it after you’ve learned to manage it? Keeping these contacts in order is a big part of growing your business, which we talk about a bit in our blog about Small Business Strategy.
8. Automate Your Marketing
Imagine a world where you didn’t have to follow up with leads as often, but they still received content about your brand. Marketing automation makes this real (and it’s even better than it sounds).
9. Improve Your Visibility
One of the hardest parts of being a small business is that there are so many other small businesses. Standing out in a crowd of people that offer the same products or services can be difficult, but isn’t impossible.
10. Build Excitement
Your small business is exciting, whether you’re booking dentist appointments or offering a deal on pizza. Email marketing will remind people why they should be excited about your brand and what exciting things are still to come!
Email marketing may seem like it’s becoming a thing of the past, but with more and more consumers checking their inboxes digitally, that’s very unlikely. Stay at the top of your customers’ inboxes using these tips and check out some of our other blogs about marketing strategy: