Why Small Businesses should utilise Email Marketing.

Email marketing is an effective way to connect with consumers who have already expressed an interest in your product or service by subscribing.

A report by Radicati Group in 2018 showed that:

More than 34% of people worldwide use email, that being roughly 2.5 billion people.

This has only continued to increase over the years.

With a generation overloaded with different forms of marketing, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. By no means does that mean you need to be on all of them.

Email marketing is usually at the latter end of the marketing funnel for a business. To get someone interested enough to hand over their email address, you need to warm them up through other forms of contact. This is one occassion where social media and paid advertising can come in handy.

There are 3 clear steps generally taken in building an email list:

1. Creating a reason for somebody to sign up
2. Making the information accessible to your target market to sign-up
3. Then collecting their email addresses

This is called a funnel. Funnels are very important for collecting interested parties email addresses. Once you’ve collected them, the hardest part is over (although let’s be real, marketing is a continuous cycle).

Radicati Group’s list of statistics show that email marketing is to be the most effective form of marketing for customer acquisition.

Converting a sale through email marketing is so much easier then convincing someone to buy your product/service among the never-ending cycle of options on the web. As people that are on your mailing list have made the choice to be there, they already have an interest in your product or services.

What are the benefits of email marketing?

To touch on a few:

1. Keeping in contact with you audience means staying top of mind.
2. Cost-effective marketing strategy
3. Real-time engagement
4. Accessible as most people use email
5. Increase brand awareness

How to enhance your email marketing?

• Be authentic in your copywriting. Email marketing is more personal, so make sure your tone of voice reflects this. Nobody likes a sell sell sell approach.

• Brand consistency. As well as tone of voice, keeping a coherent visual identity conveys professionalism and keeps your audience’s attention.

• Obvious enough maybe? But knowing the balance between using a few call to action buttons throughout, without spamming your reader is important.

• Along with point 2, images keep interest. So it’s never a bad idea to include some!

• Sometimes the hardest one of all, but setting yourself some time to send out an email on a scheduled basis reminds your customers that you’re still there!