Why Email Marketing is Essential to Your Business
Unless you still communicate through telegraph or smoke signals, the chances are that you have an active email address. This is true for more than 4 billion worldwide, and the number of daily email users is expected to increase through 2026.
The mere number of people with access to emails, added to the fact that up to 60 percent of customers want businesses to contact them via email, makes this channel type a crucial way to communicate with customers.
In this article, we present a detailed lowdown of why email marketing is essential to your business. We start by examining what email marketing is and finally guide you on choosing an email marketing agency. You will also learn how often to send out emails for maximum impact.
First Things First, What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing channel that uses email communications to reach and engage customers.
Marketing emails can be used to acquire customers, drive website traffic, create brand awareness, drive sales, reward customer loyalty, and enhance customer engagement.
Through email marketing, you can reach new customers and acquaint them with your business or engage existing clients and build deeper relationships with them. You can use email marketing to turn prospects into paying customers and existing customers into loyal brand fans.
Whether you send promotional emails or weekly newsletters, you must follow an appropriate strategy to realize the best click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, list growth rates, and greater ROI (return on investment).
More importantly, you must measure results and systematically improve your messaging and overall strategy to maximize your returns.
Why Email Marketing Is Important to Your Business
Despite being one of the oldest channels of communicating business messages to customers, emails remain incredibly popular.In fact, some 86% of your loyal consumers might expect to receive promotional emails from you at least monthly. According to a report, up to 15% of them prefer daily email communications from you and your brand!Furthermore, email is popular across different user generations. So it should allow you to reach broad audiences with your marketing copy.Here is a look at why email marketing is essential to your business, its size notwithstanding.
Email Provides a Measurable, Scalable Way to Grow Your Business
How do you tell when your business is growing? Increasing profit margins? Larger workforce? More customers? Increased traffic to your website, perhaps?
Perhaps it is all of these.
Ultimately, it is the increase in the numbers that indicate growth. It is the same thing with email marketing.
The channel provides various numerical data points instead of mere inferential signals. This makes it easier to gauge whether your campaigns are yielding the desired results. Campaigns that perform better will have more clicks, higher open rates, and greater conversions.
To tell whether your campaigns are performing better, all you have to do is look for increases in delivery reports, clicks, open rates, and web traffic. And to scale, all you have to do is increase your email lists.
With that, you increase your chances of growing your ROI.
It Provides Unprecedented Reach to Various Customer Segments
Email provides a direct line to your audience. It allows you to deliver your marketing message straight into the customer’s inbox where no other distractions exist.
And with more than half the planet using email today, the chances are that everyone in your target audience has an active email address.
Here is where things get even more exciting: 99% of email users check their email every day. That’s a 99% likelihood of your intended audience seeing your delivered emails the same day.
Most email users check their email first thing before heading out to social media or news sites. This situation greatly increases the likelihood of your message reaching the customer, unlike other digital channels marred by all kinds of distractions.
You Can Establish a Deeper Connection with Customers through Email
The personal nature of emails makes them an excellent conduit for sending out personal messages, exclusive offers, and value-driven content.
People love personalized messages and individualized attention. Don’t take my word for it. Instead, trust the numbers: according to McKinsey, 76% of consumers will likely buy from you if you personalize the experience.
Additionally, Adobe reports that up to 89% of marketers see an increase in ROI when they leverage personalized campaigns.
These are just a few statistics showing how important it is to personalize your email campaigns.
What does personalization have to do with establishing deeper customer connections? By segmenting your email list and tailoring your content to specific user groups, you can deliver more relevant and helpful messages that resonate with your customers on a personal level.
With personalization, the audience gets a sense of individual attention, which fosters stronger connections.
When you consistently provide value and personalize your approach, email marketing can significantly build and maintain stronger connections with your customers.
Email Allows For Targeted Messaging, Which Can Reduce Budget Wastage
When you segment your email lists and send targeted messages to specific audiences, you ensure that your marketing efforts focus on the right audience.
This can go a long way in ensuring that every email you send generates the desired response instead of committing resources to people uninterested in your offering.
The last thing you want as a marketer is to spend time and money on a value proposition only to direct it to an inactive or disengaged user that will never respond.
Unfortunately, most marketing channels, such as traditional ads, do not provide a means to control the nature of the person receiving your message.
But emails are different. You can control every aspect of the campaign, including weeding out inactive or disengaged subscribers from your email lists. This quality significantly eliminates guesswork from your campaigns.
It Provides a Cost-Effective Way to Communicate with Customers
Targeted messaging and the cost-effectiveness of email marketing go hand in hand.
Email allows you to target specific segments of your audience based on their demographics, behavior, or preferences. By sending tailored messages to the right people, you can increase your campaigns’ relevance and effectiveness, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
This way, email’s targeted approach lets you make the most out of your marketing budget by focusing on the audience that is most likely to respond positively to your messages.
Furthermore, producing and distributing an email copy costs far less than traditional mail or print campaigns. And a single email copy can reach thousands of subscribers instantly at the touch of the send button, irrespective of their geographical locations.
Overall, emails enjoy a low cost per contact. You will generally incur low costs to send emails to your subscribers, especially when compared to traditional marketing methods like direct mail or print advertising.
You don’t have to worry about printing or postage expenses. Instead, you pay for an email marketing platform or service provider (ESP), both of which offer affordable pricing plans based on the size of your email list or the number of emails sent.
Not to mention that you can correct a typo or adjust your email copy following an undesirable response at no added cost. The channel allows you to fix mistakes that could cost you on other channels with a simple follow-up email acknowledging or correcting a mistake.
Compelling Email Messaging Can Quickly Lead To Conversions
Timing, wording, content… all these things determine how your audience will react to your email messages.
Research shows that many customers are likely to buy if they receive a compelling offer on time. Some of the message characteristics likely to compel the subscriber to act include urgency, an offer for free shipping, and large product discounts.
The messaging is even more effective if it appears personalized, making the receiver feel that it was designed just for them. As a primary feature, this tactic usually involves addressing the receiver by name.
Since email is an instant means of communication, the message reaches the audience as soon as you hit the send button. And if you crafted the message properly, you can expect them to take the required action immediately, leading to quick conversions.
You Can Stay Engaged With Customers through Automation
Every business has many moving parts, so you may not have all the time to keep sending emails daily to your subscribers.
Thankfully, many email marketing tools allow you to automate the process and plan ahead. All you have to do is develop the content and program it to launch at specific times. You can then focus on other aspects of your business while the automated emails keep engaging your subscribers.
If you are short on the skills to automate email campaigns yourself, you can always enlist the help of an email marketing specialist.
Email Marketing Can Increase Web Traffic and Sales
One of the key features of emails is their support for custom call-to-action (CTA) buttons. Embedding compelling and visually appealing CTAs in your emails that encourage recipients to click through to your website can drastically increase your web traffic.
Your CTAs can have action-oriented language such as “Shop Now,” “Learn More,” and “Get Started” for high response rates.
To get more people to see the CTAs, be sure to use equally compelling subject lines. Notice that 47% of your subscribers will likely click on an email purely based on the subject line. Even more interestingly, some 69% of your new subscribers might label an email as spam based on the very subject line, according to Invesp.
So, ensure you do an excellent job on, you guessed it, the email’s subject line! Craft attention-grabbing subject lines that pique the interest of your subscribers and entice them to open your emails.
How to Choose a Marketing Agency
Since email marketing is top on the list of ROI-generating digital marketing channels, it is crucial that you put it in the right hands to make the most out of your campaigns. So here’s how to choose an email marketing agency.
Request references and examine their portfolio to see if you like the work they’ve done.
Enquire about their email tools.
Check the company’s pricing page to determine if it aligns with your budget.
Check out the prospective marketing agency’s company values.
Check out the team to see if they have the skills you need.
How Often Should You Send Email Marketing Messages
You should send three to five email marketing messages every week to get the best results, according to Omnisend data. This translates to approximately 10–19 emails a month. But, of course, campaigns should have planning and goals before this is decided with room for adaptations.
How Much Is Email Marketing Likely To Cost?
Email marketing is likely to cost an average of approximately $2,500 per month since most agencies charge around $100 – $200 an hour.
While this can seem like a huge investment for a small business that is just starting out with email marketing, the rewards can be worth the cost. Hiring an email marketing consultant can steer your business toward accelerated growth, making the investment a small price to pay.
Is Email Marketing For You?
Email marketing is one of the best ways to grow a business. So is it suitable for you?
As long as you are looking to grow your business or even a piece of your business, email marketing is an excellent way to do it. Whether you have a small business or a large enterprise, email marketing can help you acquire new customers and establish deeper connections with existing ones, accelerating your growth.
Why Email Marketing is Essential to Your Business: Recap
So, why is email marketing essential to your business? In this article, we have provided eight reasons, including providing a scalable way to grow your business, unprecedented reach, deeper customer connections, reduced budget wastage, and cost-effectiveness.
We have also explained how email can increase your site’s traffic, provide greater conversions, and increase sales, leading to more ROI.
While we have also provided a few bulleted points on how to choose a marketing agency, keep an eye out on our subsequent posts for in-depth and more helpful discussion on the topic.
Now, all these benefits of email marketing are realistically achievable and well-documented. But that realization requires an effective strategy and clear execution plan, which many businesses struggle with. That’s why it is best to have an email marketing specialist help you out.