13 Email Marketing Benefits [+ Examples]
There’s so much hype around email marketing tools nowadays.
Each of the hundreds of email software providers will persuade you that their own tools deliver the best value for money. They will bait you with a flawless onboarding process, easy set-up, and beautiful sign-up forms. They promise you that their never-sleeping customer care team is ready to support you 24/7, and you bite.
But why should you, as a small business owner, use any of these email marketing platforms at all? What are the real benefits of email marketing?
Below are 13 reasons why you should use email marketing to grow your small business. Read on to find out how a single email marketing tool can help you retain life-long customers and stay on the top-of-mind with prospects.
Key Email Marketing Benefits
1. Emails Grow Leads and Increase Brand Awareness
Email marketing software can help businesses of all sizes generate leads with signup forms and convert shoppers off-the-street into returning buyers, but the software is especially relevant for small businesses.
When you can’t afford to hire a full-time email marketing specialist, and still have a growing customer base to message, the automation tools pay off big time. For me, fast lead generation is one of the most significant benefits of email marketing.
2. Emails Provide Great Return on Investment
Old-school spreadsheets coupled with ThunderBird or AppleMail no longer cut it. You’ve got to send marketing emails, filter spam, segment your audience groups, and manage your lead lists. On the other hand, today’s email marketing solutions may cost you a fortune, but not all of them are so expensive!
If you have a small marketing budget and plan to spend it on promotion, go for email marketing — a marketing initiative with an exceptional return on investment. This relatively new marketing channel will connect you with your target audience in an effective and non-intrusive way.
3. Emails Make Customers Happier
Sending detailed shipping notifications is one of the best ways to make your customers happier.
To ensure strong customer service and make users more brand loyal, send notifications right after the item is dispatched — not the next day, not in a week.
Example: Olivia from Belgium discovered a cozy set of plaid pajamas for her son on your Boston-based eCommerce website. She is waiting for the item to be shipped, but what if you don’t ship overseas? She needs to know right now, and it’s 2 am in Boston! Sending an automatic confirmation email will inform her right away that the purchase was successful, so she doesn’t cancel her order.
4. Emails Offer You the Opportunity to Upsell
The opportunity to sell more stuff to a loyal customer is one of the most convincing email marketing benefits!
Transactional emails are an ideal place to boost your eCommerce revenue. If there’s anything that you can upsell, go on, do it! Connect with your inner salesperson and make sure your customers have everything they need to make another purchase.
All sorts of eCommerce email marketing techniques should work in this case — from cross-selling to discount coupons. The only limit is your imagination.
Example: Alex Smith just moved into a new home and purchased an expensive bedding set on your eCommerce site. He keeps refreshing his user inbox looking for an order confirmation email. Little do you know, he’s also looking for pillows, a bedframe, and other bedroom accessories. A purchase confirmation email that provides links to complementary products could be just what the doctor ordered.
5. React Quickly Using Automated Emails
It’s next to impossible to reach out to every new customer personally. If you dare do it, you will probably have to stop sleeping or hire hundreds of support people to manage the volume of all your incoming emails. And hiring dozens of customer service representatives to follow-up with your customers is not cost-effective at all.
The ability to quickly onboard your new customers is one of the strongest benefits of email marketing. Transactional email services can manage the never-ending volume of incoming emails for you. Not only will they reduce your monthly staffing costs, but they will also cement your relationship with new customers.
Below is an example of an onboarding email from CoSchedule:
Though it looks like a real person contacting you, we all know that it is just a part of CoSchedule’s marketing strategy.
6. Emails Combat Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment is a serious issue. Luckily, there are many eCommerce email marketing techniques that can help quickly turn abandoned carts into completed sales.
Refer to CHAPTER 5 for the details.
7. Emails Strengthen Relationships With Your Standing Customers
Another benefit of email marketing is that it provides many avenues for interacting with your business — be it through an app download, a call to action, or a social media follow.
All types of transactional notifications are well suited deepening the connection that your brand has with one particular customer.
Example: Let’s imagine you have a loyal fan, Kathie. Occasionally, she buys products or services from your eCommerce website and gets email notifications from you. But email is not enough for her. She is eager to follow you on Twitter and shop on your mobile device, if only she knew how.
Why not allow your customers to interact with your brand the way they prefer?
8. Emails Will Considerably Reduce Staffing Costs
Using email marketing tools is the best way to optimize your workforce, which is another advantage of email marketing for growing businesses.
According to Formrush, about 347.3 billion emails are currently sent and received each day, and some 85% of the US population use email actively.
Just imagine, if one customer service rep spends as little as 2 minutes answering a single customer, it will take them half the working day to get through their inbox.
How about sending email newsletters? Sending emails one by one will certainly kill the other half of your employee’s 8-hour working day. And it’s next to impossible to create personalized emails for each customer. Otherwise, you will rub your fingers to the bone typing.
Now think. Do you need a human to manage your email marketing campaigns when you have a perfect lightning-fast email tool available for a reasonable price?
There is also an advanced selection of free email marketing tools that can send newsletters in a split second. With a modest amount of subscribers, you may send thousands of marketing and transactional emails without hiring anyone, spending a penny, and lifting a finger.
And while the pricing of email marketing tools is based either on the number of emails or the size of your email list, marketing automation tools usually cost more than newsletter apps and autoresponders.
9. Smart Email Marketing Controls the Amount of Money Spent on Online Marketing
Choosing an email marketing software with the features you need, at the price you can afford, is possible — though tricky.
The price is usually based on the number of emails you send monthly or the size of your mailing list. If you are planning to run expansive marketing campaigns, you will have to obtain a powerful email marketing tool, and that usually costs money.
The benefit of email marketing is that, once you pick the plan, the money you spend each month is predictable.
If you have around 2,000 subscribers and do not plan to send more than 12K emails per month, Mailchimp will be forever free.
Mailjet’s is probably the most generous email marketing system — its free plan allows you 100K contacts, and you get to send 6K emails a month.
The free test plan of the Zoho Campaign web-based solution unlocks even more — 12K emails and 2K subscribers a month. Quite convenient for those who end up playing email tag with their customers. Pricing starts with only $5/month.
Some advanced email marketing service providers, like Campaign Monitor or Constant Contact, have a free trial only. The costs of their basic plans vary from $9 to $20 a month.
10. Automating Manual Email Processes Will Save You Time
Email marketing is a wonderful way to save your time.
A consistent theme of X-Cart customers is that they’re running a ‘one-man show.’ They do everything — from manufacturing products to shipping orders around the world — all without anyone’s help. It goes without saying that time optimization is much needed for businesses like that.
Here’s why marketing automation has become so popular over the last few years. It was invented to help eCommerce site owners start drip campaigns when a sale is completed, schedule and distribute personalized emails based on the things customers purchase, automatically capture user emails through signup forms, and summarize user lists under one roof.
Most email marketing providers have a reputation for being rather budget-unfriendly and challenging to manage. But don’t be trapped by conventional wisdom — there are lots of budget-friendly, and easy-to-use automation tools focused on vetting contacts and getting them back to abandoned carts.
Below are a couple of examples for you:
Contactually can be a good example of advanced automation software. It collects contacts from your email inbox, website, and social media profiles, and then notifies you of the best moment to reach people when they are highly engaged.
HubSpot is considered to be one of the best automated email marketing software. It’s quite costly, though.
The ability to create tags is the defining feature of BenchmarkONE, a small email marketing software for small businesses. It allows you to assign different labels to your users based on their interests or the stage of the funnel they are in at the moment.
Mad Mimi is an easy to use email marketing platform for non-computer people. With this tool, you can create newsletters, signup forms, and sales landing pages. But it’s not so great if you really want to customize everything.
All in all, no matter what email marketing web-based solution you choose for your business, it will benefit your business by saving a lot of time. All you need to do is to pick the one that fits your needs and pocket.
11. You’ll Get Away Without a Designer and a Developer
One of the top benefits of email marketing is that you do not need a designer or a tech person to create stylish design templates for your email newsletters. Almost every email marketing tool has a wide range of email templates to choose from.
Professional-looking email newsletters will boost your conversion rates and improve the image of your eCommerce business.
The best email marketing software usually comes with three design options:
- Pre-designed templates, making it easy for beginners to create modern emails in a few clicks.
- Imported HTML templates, documents, images, polls, links to surveys, videos, etc.
- Start from scratch, creating a custom design using an email editor.
Some advanced email marketing tools have drag-and-drop UI allowing you to quickly build nice-looking emails just by arranging pre-designed elements. No coding or photoshopping required.
12. You Will Be Able to Track Your Email Marketing Metrics
When running email marketing campaigns, you will need to connect your shopping cart to some tracking software to better understand the results of your email marketing campaigns.
The benefit of email marketing is that the tracking option is already built in for most modern email marketing tools. They provide you with easy-to-interpret analytics such as open rates, and click-through rates. Use these metrics to plan your next email campaigns!
13. Email Marketing Can Help Your SEO Efforts
Another benefit of email marketing is that it can drive qualified leads to your site. The more time customers spend on your page and the lower your bounce rate, the higher your article is displayed in search engines.
This guide to content marketing should help you do it right.
It’s important to segment your audience and send highly relevant and personalized emails to your subscribers.
You can also encourage social shares through the emails you send. And Google loves when content is shared on social.
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Now that you know that using email tools is more efficient than hiring another marketing manager, it’s time to find the best email marketing tool for your business.
What do you think is the biggest benefit of email marketing?
Chapters
Helen is an SEO and Content Marketing Specialist. She has been creating and planning content for over 10 years, with 5+ years specializing in eCommerce.
