Email marketing benefits: Top 5 reasons why your business needs email marketing in 2021
Email marketing is often overlooked by small and medium businesses.
Whether it’s simply misunderstood and put in the too-hard basket or perhaps the allure of social media is too great so we’re drawn to that instead, email marketing isn’t used as much as it should be.
However, the benefits of email marketing can’t be ignored. And once you have a solid email marketing list, it can be a powerful marketing tool that can help generate significant revenue for your business.
Here are the top 5 email marketing benefits for businesses, and why your business needs email marketing in 2021.
1. To keep your company top of mind
One of the best ways to utilise email marketing is with a monthly company newsletter.
A consistent newsletter with quality content will help keep your company top of mind and build loyalty with your audience.
Ultimately, it will ensure your brand remains in their consideration set when they’re actively looking to make a purchase.
A good newsletter to your email marketing list should provide value to your readers by way of educational articles, free resources, upcoming company events and company news.
So it’s not a place for the hard sell.
But as with any marketing and communications activity, email marketing (and by extension a company newsletter) needs a solid strategy to ensure you’re maximising its potential.
2. So you can personalise communications to your customers
Unlike most other digital channels, email marketing allows you to personalise your communications.
This might be as simple as using the recipient's first name in the subject line or intro, which can help grab their attention and lead to higher engagement.
Or it could be a little more complex by segmenting your email list and sending communications based on their interests or demographic.
For example, if you’re a travel agency you could send cruise liner holiday deals to your over 65s cohort, while at the same time send South American backpacking deals to your 18-30 year old contacts.
3. To survey your email list
Completing an annual survey of your email marketing list can have a 2-fold benefit.
Firstly, it allows you to get inside the minds of your customers and prospects to understand their interests, habits and how ready they might be to purchase your product or service.
For example, a few typical survey questions a domestic travel agency might ask could be:
Are you planning to travel domestically within the next 12 months?
Which do you prefer: relaxing holidays or adventure holidays?
What time of year do you usually go on holiday - summer, autumn, winter or spring?
With this information, you can then start to adapt your email marketing strategy, like segmenting your database and sending personalised communications based on their answers.
The second benefit is that you can use this information gained from your survey to produce content to help market your business.
For example, you could write a blog for your website using the results, publish some of the key stats on your social channels and even compile a press release to send to the media to get some positive PR for your company (pro tip: the media love stats they can quote i.e. 67% of people prefer adventure holidays over relaxing holidays).
4. So you can manage your own audiences
Do you know the best thing about building your own email marketing list?
It’s all yours!
That’s right. You own the list. You’re not relying on audiences from Facebook or LinkedIn.
That means you can send any type of communications to them, whenever you want (we recommend taking a more strategic approach though because people will unsubscribe from your list if you simply bombard them with emails or don’t give them value.)
You’ll also have complete visibility on what actions your contacts are taking and how they’re interacting with your email communications.
This can help guide the content you use on your other channels.
For example, if an article in your company newsletter gained higher engagement, then you know people are really interested in this topic.
Therefore, push the same article out onto your social channels, use it in a paid social campaign, and create more articles on the same or similar topics.
5. Email marketing is super cost effective
Let’s be clear - you can’t just build an email list of thousands overnight.
It’s not like paid social media campaigns where you can buy an audience at the click of a button to start marketing too. It takes more time.
However, email marketing is super cost effective.
Once you have a person’s name and email address, it’s free to email them - how good is that!
You don’t have to hand over money to Facebook or LinkedIn so marketing to your list becomes extremely cost effective.
Yes, email marketing is a medium-term marketing strategy.
But if you start today, your business will begin to reap the benefits as you slowly start to grow your email marketing list.
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