First things first: What is Email Marketing? It is a digital marketing strategy that allows you to send email messages directly to your contact list, a subset of that list, or a list of email addresses. The purpose of email marketing is to provide valuable information to potential clients and customers, to promote your business, to get people interested in your business, and drive conversion.
Here are some of the benefits of email marketing that small businesses should consider.
People Use Email Everyday (multiple times per day!)
There are around 5.6 billion active email accounts in the world, and 99% of consumers check their email daily. The average person actually checks their email as many as 20 times a day!
Reaches Consumers Directly
When you send an email marketing message, you’re directly communicating with your customers through their inboxes, which gives you a one-to-one connection with your customers that’s hard to find in digital marketing, making it an extremely effective way to reach people.
Drive Users to Take an Action
You can use email marketing to advertise a promotion or deal you’re running, encourage consumers to sign up for your newsletter, nurture leads, or even drive them to visit your business instore or online. The best email marketing campaigns are built around specific goals that encourage customers to take action.
Keeps Your Business Top of Mind
In addition to using email marketing to drive your audience to act, you can also send educational information that presents you as a leader in your industry. This positions your business as an expert and can help you stay top of mind with your audience, leading them to contact you when they need a business in your field.
Easily Tracked
With email marketing, you can easily track and measure success with several important and helpful metrics, including:
- Open rate: The number of people who opened your email out of the number of people who received it. A good open rate for a marketing email is around 20%, but it varies by industry.
- Click-through-rate (CTR): The percentage of people who clicked on a call-to-action in your email. Generally, the higher the CTR, the better your email is performing.
- Leads: People who contact you to become your customer or to get more information.
- Unsubscribes: The number of people opting out of receiving your emails in the future.
These metrics tell you how effective your email marketing campaigns are and highlight areas for improvement. For instance, a less-than-stellar open rate might tell you that you need to test new, engaging subject lines to encourage more customers to open your email.
