Since the dawn of online marketing, emails have played a massive role in connecting with customers and other businesses every day.
And in some form or another, we all have dabbled with email marketing, whether it was effective or not.
Email marketing, because of its cost-effectiveness and large-scale use, benefits all business types, B2B, B2C, startups, small businesses, corporations, you name it. We all need emails to function.
Others need it more than others, and there we can find the opportunity of using email marketing as a channel for growth.
Something so common and daily can be beneficial when used correctly, making emails a necessary marketing tool.
This article will explore and discover what email marketing is through the many benefits it offers to businesses and why it’s a marketing channel not to miss today and beyond.
What Is Email Marketing
Email marketing is about creating and sending emails to existing and new customers and prospects with the marketing goal of getting your brand out there, gaining sales, and any other online goal you have for your business.
Every email sent by a business is technically email marketing. Nowadays, with modern platforms, analytics, targeted audiences, personalization, and many other features and benefits of email marketing, make it a complete strategy and marketing channel instead of just sending emails.
And as a channel and strategy, the way we combine emails into our overarching marketing strategies makes all the difference in creating email marketing into a viable option to grow our business cost-effectively, while listening to our target audiences.
14 Email Marketing Benefits
- Owned marketing channel
- Traffic to landing pages and websites
- Easy and fast to start
- Benefits all business types
- Improves customer support
- Benefits brand building
- Tool availability
- Audience segmentation
- Content distribution channel
- Increase revenue
- Automation
- Remarketing and higher marketing ROI
- Cost-effective and low costs
- Analytics
Owned Marketing Channel
If you think critically about your marketing efforts, what channels does your company own?
Sure, you own your website and everything around it. Still, you don’t own the methods of generating traffic, whether that be organic traffic from Google or other alternative search engines, or social media marketing.
That is why email marketing and the list you can collect are super valuable and crucial in the bigger picture.
A big email list is a business opportunity by itself.
And many businesses only need one big email list for promoting their products instead of relying on other forms of traffic.
Owning a channel and means of traffic generation is crucial in online business.
The more you need to rely on other platforms to run your business, the weaker you are by default.
Say your social media profiles get hacked or lose 50% of organic traffic due to Google’s algorithm change. You will always have your email list to fall on.
We can conclude that building an email list is almost as important as building a good website. An email list is where your new and old customers can always find you, your product, and your services.
Traffic To Landing Pages And Websites
One of the best benefits of email marketing is traffic generation. Re-engaging with website visitors is crucial in any marketing strategy.
And as an owned channel, you control traffic flow from an email list to your website.
Whether you send traffic to the newest blog posts or product reveals, the initial traffic benefits to a new and specific page are huge.
Email marketing can bring the much-needed initial traffic to a new page, which, in turn, will impact its search engine optimization faster!
Also, the initial traffic helps you discover early on if something is wrong with the page. For example, you could analyze initial engagement metrics to make crucial changes to a landing page to convert better.
When you get those conversion rates better for a landing page, you can start scaling with traffic generation via ads.
Another example is that you can send relevant posts and products to those who would like to receive them.
If a potential customer would come to your website organically and search for X and then with good luck, subscribe to a relevant part of your newsletter, you can keep sending them content they enjoy.
Especially great when initially, the customer couldn’t find what they wanted in the first place.
The main takeaway is that emails are a great way to get previously engaged visitors back on your site when you have relevant updates according to their tastes.
Easy and Fast To Start
Nowadays, you can get started with email marketing easily and frankly quite fast.
For example, if you’re using any of the website building platforms available, all of them would either have built-in email marketing solutions, or you can integrate third-party email marketing tools.
All-in-one email solutions like Mailchimp, for example, have integrations available for the largest platforms or via code to any website.
So, tech-wise you’ll have an email marketing setup easily.
But what about the campaigns themselves?
For starting, decide what you want to get out of the email marketing itself. Are you looking for sales, visitors to blogs, or customer input?
Depending on the goals, you can start developing email campaigns to fit those needs.
And in most cases, people who subscribe to an email list will want to receive news from you, meaning you can re-edit the content you already have to fit the email format.
As you get more subscribers and data on what they really would like to receive, you can start modifying the content to fit the purpose better.
In the beginning, it will be hard to tell what your subscriber truly wants, but eventually, you’ll learn it through data, and always remember to test new things. But always keep the emails relevant to the original promise you made for the subscribers, or you’ll lose them.
Benefits All Business Types
While it’s evident that an online business would gain the most benefits from email marketing, you can use an online medium to send traffic and sell online.
But regardless of being online or physical, email marketing can be hugely beneficial for all types of businesses and industries.
For example, you own a clothing retail store, and you build an email list from customers coming to your store. You can then send relevant info about promotions to said store whenever you have them.
And email marketing doesn’t have to be about just sales. Going back to the example, you could also, as the retail store, give relevant news about the store to the most engaging customers who might be interested in how you’re doing.
Through emails, a business gets a direct communication channel with the people who care about the company.
Email Marketing Improves Customer Support
A customer support channel done via email helps your marketing efforts considerably.
Think about it like this. You receive an email from a customer with a problem. When you fix the problem to customers, not only will you increase the chance of sales, but you would create a great experience for the customers, making them come back to you.
The easier it is for customers to contact you, the more trust and credibility you build with the customers, creating brand loyalty.
All sorts of customer interactions help your brand achieve more, and email is an excellent and personal (when done correctly) method of contact to customers and business partners alike.
But emails can do more than just support. Through them, you can actively involve customers in developing your business via gaining and listening feedback.
Emails allow you to create customer surveys to improve your business aspects or use them to learn more about your target audiences and serve them better.
Personalization allows you to yield greater results when compared to the other marketing methods you use.
Email Marketing Benefits To Brand Building
Even if someone buys from you, they might not have bought into your brand.
So, how do we build brands with emails?
By building credibility and trust even further by giving content that they genuinely want. Let your customers know who you are through the email marketing campaigns you do.
If they are willing to listen by subscribing to you, you have a great chance to take your brand to the next level.
You need to respect the people who follow you according to your brand.
Build relationships with your email lists and don’t take the people for granted as they will vote by unsubscribing, which would be a dent your brand
Solid brand recognition happens through building reliable and engaging communication through content.
Availability of Email Marketing Tools
One great benefit of email marketing is the availability of different tools at various costs and features.
You can use many tools and platforms for free when starting and pay for them as you scale.
The tools make using email marketing straightforward and can help any company to achieve more through emails.
And the tools you can use have plenty of options when it comes to integrations, meaning there will be a solution for everyone regardless of the size of the business, customer list, or revenue.
There are also many niche tools when you want to achieve something specific, making email marketing a flexible channel to grow a business.
When choosing the right tools, you should start with an all-in-one solution that would cover most of your needs (from building an email list and campaign creation). If you discover that you might need a specific feature, in most cases, you add the tools to your overall campaigns later on.
Take the time to explore through different options at the start, because you don’t want to be changing email platform every other month after discovering cool features. And when deciding tools, remember the goals you wanted to achieve with the emails in the first place.
Audience Segmentation
Audience segmentation is the ultimate benefit of email marketing. You can create as many segments of your audience as possible, depending on the lists’ size.
In the perfect world, you would create content for each segment to increase engagement, sales, and other conversions.
Those who succeed the most with email marketing utilizes audience segments to the fullest. As you can’t please everyone with the same content types and even if your target audience is similar, they will still enjoy other types of content more than different types.
In its simplest form, you can segment your audience by the actions they do.
For example, different audience segments to try:
- Customers
- Repeat customers
- Leads
- Blog readers
- Newly subscribed
- Most likely to click a link from an email
- And more.
The thing about segments is that they are highly customizable to your needs. Whatever the need or goal, you can create an audience segment from your lists to achieve it.
A tip to using segments is to have a proper plan to use them. It will be easier to have your audience in segments before launching any significant email marketing efforts, although you can always modify it to fit your needs.
Through different segments, your email marketing campaign will be more personalized and targeted. Through data, you can learn what emails which groups enjoy the most to optimize your email strategy for the better.
You can use audience segmentation to A/B test with different titles, body text, and images to see what works and what doesn’t.
A Content Distribution Channel For Engaging Content
As a content distribution channel, email marketing is flexible and a great way to get your content seen by your target audiences.
Any forms of content you created before, you can edit into an email form pretty quickly.
Say you create a multi-channel ad campaign that
- Starts with a blog post
- Uses blog content to generate Pinterest ads
- And uses the same images for remarketing with display ads (Google Ads)
You could combine the best parts of the blog post with the images from ads and create a campaign for your email subscribers.
The larger your email lists get, the more impactful channel it will be in your content distribution strategy.
In most cases, it’s a good idea to always include email marketing as a channel to your broader campaigns.
Increase Leads
Email marketing by itself is a great strategy to gain more and more leads from existing and new audiences.
For example, you’re collecting different types of leads on your website, some cold, and some hot.
With correct segmentation, your sales team can engage with leads with the content they desire to warm up the lead further. And, eventually, make a sale from the lead.
But collecting leads is a strong email marketing benefit as you can drive visitors to landing pages with strong lead magnets to collect said leads. And you can nurture them further with more emails to increase the conversion rates.
If you have segments that aren’t sales leads (like blog newsletters followers, etc. ), you can slowly introduce the email list to your products that you have available. If they interact and engage with the products, you can effectively take the segment into your sales funnels.
For collecting leads, emails are a superior method if you’re spending on content marketing or ads in the first place. Even if someone doesn’t convert today, they might convert later on, and you’ll want to get them into your email lists.
Email Marketing Increases Revenue
Email marketing isn’t just for attracting and finding new customers, but for genuinely increasing sales by increasing the chances of gaining repeat customers.
A robust regular newsletter can be a sales generating asset like nothing else.
For example, reselling to existing customers who already bought and shown interest in something you offer, by just letting them know that you provide what they need, might land you a sale again and again.
And we usually don’t buy something from the first moment we see the offer, but if a customer is so interested in leaving their email, it indicates a strong interest in your brand to sell more.
Or through emails, you can also build hype for new product launches, sales events like Black Friday, way before, the event is live on your site with the emails.
Add some audience segmentation here, and you will increase sales with email marketing when customers know something is about to happen.
But in general, as a sales generating asset, an email list is excellent with the addition of checkout processes directly embedded into your emails. And it makes your email flow by itself a critical part of your business.
Email Marketing Automation
Automations are a core benefit of email marketing, as even the simplest email automation can be highly useful to get results.
Some simple automations to consider:
- Welcome email campaigns
- Scheduled re-engagement campaigns
- Personizaled purchase emails
- Rewarding best customers
- Retarget site visitors
- Cart abandonments
- Subscriber milestones
- New blog post by audience segment and interests
- Retarget old customers
- Automated email campaigns triggered by custom events
As you can see from the list of examples, you can achieve a lot by having emails in your strategy, no matter your business type.
The automated campaigns are usually relatively simple to set up with the tools and platforms, requiring only the content itself and the right audience lists.
Setting up the automated campaigns early on, even if you’re unsure what you want to achieve from email marketing, can benefit a business.
As you develop further, you can get more in-depth with automation and build custom solutions to drive more sales and conversions from the campaigns.
Understanding the benefits of automation and its logic is one of the most beneficial things you can learn from email marketing to grow a business.
Remarketing & Achieve Higher Marketing ROI
Remarketing is retargeting users who have interacted with your ads or website and someone who saw your brand at least once. And using email marketing as a remarketing strategy can boost your overall marketing performance.
Virtually speaking, if you successfully collect emails when doing other digital marketing strategies, you can lower the cost of advertising as a whole while gaining more sales and other conversions.
When remarketing with emails, you can target your whole target audience in a retargeting sense as you wouldn’t have restrictions by the platforms to whom you can retarget.
While email marketing as a remarketing strategy is useful, it can be hard to achieve profitably.
As we have different goals for our online ad methods (like sales), we might not be collecting emails as efficiently if emails themselves would be the goal.
But it’s crucial to keep in mind that emails can boost marketing ROI and overall return on ad spend from all marketing campaigns combined.
Think it like this:
- You use content marketing with SEO to gain organic traffic
- And you drive traffic to your website with Facebook Ads and Google Ads
- And you have a proper way to collect emails naturally
With a defined campaign that includes multiple traffic sources, you can use emails for retargeting these users again and again for achieving sales and other conversions, which would lower your cost of acquisition further.
Email Marketing Costs
By itself, email marketing is a low-cost and cost-effective marketing strategy.
What do you need for an email marketing campaign?
In a nutshell, you’ll need some copy, some images, the tools running your email campaigns, which most companies are capable of doing if they’re creating content on their websites anyway, thus lowering the resources needed.
Say, you create an awesome article, which you re-edit to fit different segments in a new format, you made a new campaign with minimal costs that fit many new segments for the same content you already created.
As we discussed earlier, you don’t need to pay to re-engage with your email lists as an owned channel.
For example, you spend $1 000 on a LinkedIn Ads campaign to specifically collect leads (and the emails, of course).
Technically you can re-engage with the same audience you gained earlier multiple times and keep your leads on a loop, which you can use to any of your goals, whether sales or visitors on a website.
Even passive ad campaigns that you use to sell something specific, email campaigns can increase the ROI for these campaigns if you’ve been properly collecting emails as a secondary goal.
Email Marketing Analytics And Metrics
Like most digital marketing methods, you can efficiently track your email marketing campaigns with proper tools and platforms.
Most tools you would use for email marketing will come with essential analytics that you can use to track, analyze, and optimize your email campaigns’ performance.
Through new tests and data that comes in, you will eventually learn how to best use email marketing in your specific case.
Learning how our target audiences engage with our business emails is crucial to get more conversions, sales, and increase the overall ROI.
Using core email metrics such as:
- Open rates
- ROI
- Conversion rates
- Shares
- Subscriber growth
- Bounce rates
Tells us how we can improve the results and pinpoint any underlying issues with data.
Combining email analytics with web analytics tools like Google Analytics or the Facebook Pixel, let us use the email data for our other marketing campaigns and measure our broader campaigns’ overall health.
For example, through these tools, you will learn the impact of emails on your overall business versus other traffic sources, which tells you where to invest the most time and money.
Learn why analytics matters in digital marketing.
Conclusion
As we can see, email marketing has tremendous benefits for businesses looking to grow sales, connecting with target audiences and building brands, and more. As a channel, it is critical in any business’s marketing strategy.
Companies that can utilize all of the benefits that email marketing offers can discover new opportunities from their existing audiences and new ones to come.
All in all, email has kept its relevance, and email itself is still finding innovation all of the time that marketers can use to improve marketing performance for any business.
And as an owned channel, a business that doesn’t invest in email marketing can find themselves struggling when other channels fall.