I work with a lot of small business owners and entrepreneurs, and sometimes they ask me “do I still need to do Email marketing?”, “isn’t that kind of old-school now?” and I always tell them IT IS NOT! Folks, email marketing is now more relevant than ever before for your business growth. One survey conducted by Litmus revealed that 91% of the consumers open their emails at least once a day. The following are top 5 reasons that make email marketing an indispensable tool in online marketing kit.
Email Marketing Boosts Sales
One of the best thing about email marketing is that it allows you to have a direct line of communication with your audience to put out whatever interests them and can push them further down the journey into becoming your customer.
You’re in front of your customers and prospects and the fact that they are opening and reading your emails means you are in a good position to sell them.
Helps You Reconnect with Your Customers
Maybe you have someone you did business with a year ago, and they know you and they were happy with you but they just haven’t needed you in a while and you haven’t been in front of their face, so here you are with an email that provides them with useful and relevant information, it is a reminder that you are still around to do business with, and they can go like “oh yeah, I did business with them and had a wonderful experience, why not do it again?”. So email marketing is an effective way to get some of those customers back that you already worked with.
Helps You Establishing Yourself as an Authority
You are regularly engaging your customers and letting them know that you are an expert on the subject they are interested in, which positions you as an authority in their eyes. You are putting your expertise and knowledge in the subject they are interested in out there by providing informative content (articles, blogs, e-books, whitepapers) that further establishes your authority and that is important in blurring out competitors and make them purchase from you and only you.
Helps you Build Direct and Personal Relationship with Customers
Your customers are already overwhelmed with tons of emails in their inboxes, and when you show up there with a personalized message (taking their names in the salutations for instance) that is from you and signed by you, it adds a ‘human element’ in the conversation and further establishes the trust.
Good news is, today email marketing goes beyond taking names when it comes to personalization as almost all the big email marketing/marketing automation software allow you to use and add different elements of personalization in your emails to make it appear more real and friendly.
Generates Valuable Leads and Referrals
When you send an email out to a list of people who have subscribed to your email campaigns by opting in their email addresses, there is a good chance that they may not be ready to make a purchase at the time your email hit their inbox. However, may be their best friend, neighbor, colleague or someone they know dealing with something that you can help with. So it is very easy for your subscribers to forward that email to those whoever this other person is (who is not your subscriber and wasn’t on your list) and provide you with another lead.
The best thing about this forward will be, it will go to their inboxes from someone they trust, something that makes the potential of this referral real promising. For some companies, email marketing efforts proved to be more fruitful in terms of generating quality leads and growing revenues than their social media efforts.
