Why Email Marketing is Essential to your Business

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel, a form of direct marketing as well as digital marketing, that uses email to promote your business’s products or services. It can help make your customers aware of your latest items or offers by integrating them into your marketing automation efforts. It can also play a pivotal role in your marketing strategy with lead generation, brand awareness, building relationships, or keeping customers engaged between purchases through different types of marketing emails.

Why Email Marketing is Essential to your Business

Why is email marketing important?

Email marketing primarily helps businesses build a relationship with their target audience. In order to grow and sustain, every business needs to:

• Generate new leads
• Convert leads into customers
• Retain existing customers

Email ticks all of these boxes and more. You can generate an email list with email subscription forms, convert leads into customers with promotional emails, and retain existing customers with customer retention emails.

Apart from that, email brings several other advantages to the table. Below are some of the most prominent ones:

1. Email is a great way to inform your customers

When you’ve grown your email list to a sizeable number (even 500 quality leads are a lot for a new business), you can deliver messages at the click of a few buttons, with no costs other than what you’re paying to your email marketing provider.

Consider an important milestone in your business. Maybe you’ve just given your product a major overhaul and you want to deliver the benefits to target customers.

To inform people, you can choose to run digital ads, and maybe publish a release in a newspaper. Both methods will cost you money and usually attract lukewarm leads.

On the other hand, if you have a juicy email list with people who voluntarily opted to receive messages, you can deliver the same message to an enthusiastic crowd for a margin of the cost of print or digital ads.

2. Email builds relationships and credibility

We’ve already discussed how email brings a touch of personalization that other channels of marketing lack.

Personalization, or in other words, understanding your audience, goes a long way in building relationships with your customers. Email gives you a chance to proactively reach out to leads and clients to show your enthusiasm and interest. People are bound to notice your enthusiasm.

Combining personalization and proactiveness, you have the ingredients for building solid relationships. But to really capitalize on strong relationships, you can use email to drive your marketing home if you use it to build credibility.

3. Email marketing is easy to measure

Most email marketing tools offer the ability to track what happens after you have sent out your email campaign. You can track delivery rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, click-through rates, and open rates. This gives you a better understanding of how your email campaigns are working, and which ones to tweak or which ones to get rid of altogether. These metrics should not be ignored. They are an important part of your internet marketing campaign as a whole. While there are various studies and surveys that present “optimal” numbers to aim for, it all depends on your industry and target audience. If your customers not only want but expect daily emails, you better provide them. However, sending too many emails to consumers who don’t want more than one a week will see your unsubscribe rate increase. It’s all about knowing your customers and providing valuable content.

4. Allows for targeted messaging

Now let’s talk about the importance of email marketing when it comes to lead nurturing – sometimes referred to as email lead marketing. The main idea here is that your potential customers are at different stages of the buying cycle. Some may be in the consideration stage, while others may be at the research and compare stage, and even others in the ready-to-purchase stage. Creating buyer personas can help you determine what kind of content to create for each step.

Segmenting these customers into appropriate email marketing lists helps businesses target these groups more effectively. Customers need the information to move them to the next buying cycle stage; pushing the right content can do just that. It’s all about moving these prospects down your sales funnel – not as quickly as possible, but as efficiently as possible.

5. Drive traffic to your website

Your website is your primary source for selling products online. However, most of the visitors will never return.

The reasons may vary. While some people don’t stay long enough to find the required information, others simply get it and leave.

In order to bring them back to your website and have any chance of selling products to your website visitors, you need to have a way to communicate with them. Adding an email subscription form to your website can help!

Once you’ve gathered your visitor’s email addresses, you can start reaching out to them with news, updates, offers, and information about your business with a CTA to visit your website.

6. Email is cost-effective

I’ve mentioned throughout the article how cheap it is to use email compared to other marketing methods. But this advantage is so big, it’s worth highlighting again.

You can reach a large number of consumers for less than pennies per message. And if you have a small mailing list, most email marketing providers will cover you with their free plans.

Mistakes in emails are easy to rectify and don’t cost any additional dollars. Plus you’re essentially giving up all costs of media acquisition. You’re cutting out the middle man and in essence becoming your own media company as email lists are your own private and direct source of communication with customers.

7. Increase brand awareness