If you are a small business owner, you likely wear many hats, including marketing. With all of the various types of digital marketing available, it can be challenging to determine where to invest your marketing dollars. Display ads, search engine marketing, social media ads, and email marketing – the options are expansive. And while we’d love to say “do it all!” we know that’s not realistic for most small businesses. So, where should you start?
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways that you can earn new customers, maintain your existing customer base, and even build your business’s reputation and credibility. Because of its effectiveness, it’s used by some of the biggest businesses in the world! But that doesn’t mean it’s just for companies with big marketing budgets. In reality, email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing tools that small businesses can use. In this blog, we’re outlining the top 4 ways that email marketing can help your small business.
Bridge the communication gap.
Depending on the type of business you run, your customers may not require your product or service for another week, month, year, or even decade! This leaves a lot of time to lose connection. We know that as much as you’d love to pick up the phone and chat with each one of your customers every so often or send them handwritten Christmas cards each year, it’s just not possible.
Email marketing bridges this communication gap by allowing you to maintain contact with your customers, even when they’re not in need of your product or service. It lets them know you’re thinking about them and, to your benefit, they’ll think about you too. They stay in the know about the happenings around your business, and stay connected through the content you share.
Keep your business top of mind.
The contact you make on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis with your customers through email marketing keeps your business’s name fresh in your customers’ minds. No need to wait for them to come to you when you can go directly to them! Catchy subject lines and enticing offers incentivize your customers to open your emails. But even if they aren’t opening your emails, they are still seeing your business’s name. Think of emails in your customers’ inboxes as billboards of the internet (with a lot more to offer).
Consistency is key with email marketing. Consistently being in communication with your customers keeps them “warm.” This means that when your customer is ready to purchase a good or service, you are their first choice. This is how email marketing helps you retain your current customer base. Consistent communication with your customers helps to develop a sense of loyalty to your brand, and customers will be much more likely to return to your business before researching different options.
It works the same way for expanding your client base! If a previous customer has a family member, friend, or neighbor who asks them for a recommendation for a good or service, their loyalty to your business leads them to recommend you. Boom – growth.
Be seen as an expert in your industry.
At Ke, we are always working toward establishing our clients’ online presence. Blogs, YouTube channels, and social media pages are all great ways to do that, but they only go so far when working alone. Email marketing allows you to combine valuable industry-specific content from all of these channels into a single, visually appealing platform.
Not only does this show your customers that you’ve got your stuff together, but it also provides them with value. Your content becomes something they look forward to reading (or watching!). And when you can provide reliable, valuable knowledge to your customers, you’ve won their vote for (insert your industry here) expert.
You can read more about how email marketing & social media integrate in one of our recent blog articles.
Reach your goals.
What’s your business goal for this quarter? Earn more leads? Drive engagement on social media? Gather sign ups for your event? Gain more reviews on Google? Promote your new services? Email marketing campaigns help you achieve these goals!
With email marketing, you are able to segment your customers into different email lists based on their behaviors, preferences, and interests. This means you are able to strategically target specific customers with unique messaging to help you achieve a specific goal. Doing this improves relevancy to your customer, which makes them much more likely to open your email and complete a specified call to action. User data released by MailChimp (a popular email marketing platform we use for many of our clients) showed that segmented campaigns get 14.37% more opens and 64.78% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns! That’s a lot of opens and clicks!
So by now we have you convinced, right? You need email marketing for your business! But we know that jumping into something new can be confusing and time consuming. That’s why we do what we do! Ready to do your thing while we do the marketing? Let’s talk.