Posted by We all know what email marketing looks like. Turn our backs for too long, and our email inboxes will often be flooded with emails from companies about sales, new product launches, and more.
However, while this might make email marketing seem like a fool’s errand, it brings big results. In fact, email marketing campaigns can have huge returns on investment – sometimes even as much as 4,400%. That means for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you could make $44 in return.
But the benefits go way beyond financial gain. Email marketing can have huge latent benefits for your business in the minds of your customers. What’s more, it’s super easy to get started with email marketing – and cheaper than you think.
A good email marketing strategy will have a litany of benefits for your company but here are eleven you might not have considered.
1. Better Promotions
Here’s the situation: Your business has launched a new product, or has a sale on. It’s a big time for your company and you’ve been going hammer-and-tongs on social media, creating more display adverts than you know what to do with, and have been pushing to get customers into your store – but you’re just not getting the results that you want.
However, email marketing gives you the perfect chance to sell your new promotion to the people that are already familiar with your brand. Maybe they’ve bought something with you in the past, or have already signed up for a similar promotion.
Either way, by crafting high-quality emails and sending them out to your customers, you’ll have a far higher chance of making the sales that you need for the promotion to be a success.
2. Widening Your Customer Net
Finding new customers is one of the hardest tasks facing any business, but the returns can be huge.
However, you’d be forgiven for thinking that email marketing requires an existing customer relationship to work. But that’s where you’re wrong.
Perhaps a customer has stumbled upon your site from Google or social media, but they’re not convinced by it. A well-timed lightbox (you know, the little thing that pops up on a web page after a certain amount of time or a certain amount of clicks) can flip that relationship on its head.
With an enticing deal – say, 10% off for newsletter subscribers – you’ll be able to turn a brand new shopper into an engaged repeat customer, even if they don’t buy anything on that first visit.
It’s these small touches that can have a big impact on your business’s bottom line.
3. Building Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty is massive. A whopping 92% of iPhone users, for example, will get another iPhone when it’s time to upgrade. By contrast, more than a quarter of Samsung users will switch to another manufacturer this year – with 53% of those switching to iPhones.
This sort of brand loyalty is hard-won, and can seem almost alchemical to a lot of businesses. Fortunately, a strong email marketing campaign can help foster the kind of loyalty that keeps Apple at the top of the smartphone game.
Regularly rewarding loyal customers not only makes them more likely to buy stuff from you again – regardless of any deals you’re currently running – but it also makes them more likely to recommend your company to friends and family.
4. Keeping Your Company Front-and-Center
Picture it – one of your customers gets an important-looking email about that thing they’re worried about.
But wait, what’s that? An email from your company with a new promotion? That seems far more interesting than some email from their boss.
And, just like that, your customers aren’t thinking about hitting their KPIs or that client meeting on Thursday – they’re thinking about buying your stuff.
This kind of email, preferably sent out with drumbeat regularity, can help keep your business ticking along nicely, especially during quiet buying times.
5. Collecting Feedback
Email marketing can be a fantastic way to improve your business through garnering customer feedback.
Building emails with surveys to let customers voice their opinions on your company can be an invaluable way to improve your offering. Is your website hard to navigate? Could the information be easier to read? Does your delivery leave a little to be desired? This sort of information can help you keep hold of customers and gain new ones.
What’s more, by asking for feedback, your customers will feel more valued, and might be more likely to buy from you again.
It’s best to make these surveys as straightforward as possible – think simple buttons and easy-to-answer questions.
6. Keep Your Business Topical
A good email platform will let you create emails ahead of time before automatically sending them at a later date.
This feature can be a great way to help your business make the most of goings-on in the wider world. Black Friday, for example, is a classic example – your business can join the fray in people’s inboxes as companies jockey for business.
However, you’re smarter than most business owners, and you can get targeting some less typical dates instead. You could create a promotion for International Women’s Day, for example, or to coincide with religious holidays.
7. Building Your Brand
Having a brand that people identify with is key in today’s world of visual marketing, and effective email marketing should be an integral part of that brand-building.
Email marketing allows you to communicate directly with potential customers in a way that suits you and your brand’s ambition. You don’t even need to try and sell them stuff, either – a good, enjoyable newsletter can help build brand authority, for example, and make your company seem far more desirable.
8. Personalized Communications
Email marketing gives companies the chance to communicate directly with an individual customer in a way that no other medium (except for posts) allows.
A good email subscriber list will include a customer’s name, as well as some information about them and their purchase history. If you know a customer is aged between 16-24, for example, you could start sending off back-to-school emails in August and September. Or, if you know that they recently bought, say, an iPad case from your store, you could send them a personalized email with other tablet peripherals.
What’s more, including a customer’s name in an email subject box can improve the open rate by up to 35%. Again, this could have a huge upside for your business.
9. Upsell Customers
Suppose a customer has just bought something from your store. Your email marketing platform can then help you send that customer some follow-up emails.
These emails, ideally, should be relevant to their previous purchase, and could feature items often bought alongside the customer’s initial purchase. Or, they could offer discounts in the future to thank the customer for their loyalty.
Again, emails like this could have a huge impact on your bottom line. Being able to turn a single sale into two for relatively little work at your end is massive.
10. Generating Traffic to Your Site
Building traffic to your site is still worthwhile, even if visitors aren’t making a purchase.
Having customers visit your site repeatedly will help to build trust and might make them more likely to refer your business to friends and family.
Likewise, it can be great to build a community of buyers, especially if you have a forum section.
They can discuss everything to do with your company, and become even more likely to buy products in the future.
11. It Doesn’t Cost a Lot
Email marketing isn’t expensive. We mentioned at the start that you can make up to 44 times your investment with email marketing, but you’ll be heartened to hear that email marketing doesn’t cost the earth to get started with.
Email marketing software can cost less than $10 per month, and compared to social media marketing, for example, you’ll have a far higher chance of making money back on your outlay.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that we’ve tried to make email marketing look like a surefire home run here. But, perhaps surprisingly for something you’ve seen on the internet, everything we’ve told you here is true. Email marketing works, and can be extremely effective in the right hands.