Email marketing is still one powerful tool for all types of businesses, especially small-scale businesses. With an effective email marketing strategy, small business owners can build a relationship with their prospects and convert them into potential customers. 

But seeing that there are digital marketing platforms, with some of them really overshadowing the effectiveness of emails, you may be wondering is it really possible to expand your business with emails? 

Yes, it’s quite true. And if you read further, you’ll see why email marketing holds such strong potential, even today.

1. Consumers Still Love to Get Notified via Email

Just like social media, the email also offers you a professional and direct medium to communicate with potential customers and reach out to a large customer base. On the consumer side, they actually prefer to communicate with brands using the same medium. And they don’t do it without purpose.

Email is a permission-based marketing channel, and almost 72% of the consumers prefer they should be asked before someone sends them a promotional message. Here are some reasons to understand why modern-day consumers go for email alerts: 

• It’s convenient: Consumers like to stay connected with their favorite brands and since they have access to email on their smartphones, they can always get the notifications from those brands. 
• It’s personal: Consumers tend to focus on personalized messages more as compared to random marketing messages via SMS, notifications from social networks, etc. This is why 66% of marketers are finding ways to execute personalized programs. 
• It’s instant: Millennials like to receive instant emails of special offers, coupons, and deals. By sending timely emails, you can get a chance to spread the word out pretty quickly.

Email Frequency:

To make it smooth for yourself and for your customers, it’s ideal to send one email a week whether it has one promotion or several different promotions. But be consistent with it.

Types of email messages:

Following are the most common types that stimulate an immediate response from the consumers:

• Sales Promotion emails
• Coupons information
• Loyalty and reward programs
• News and updates about the company
• Contests / Sweepstakes
• Free tutorials, guides, eBooks
• Exclusive deals and discount information

2. You Can Reach More Mobile Consumers

Consumers are going mobile every day, and 78% of them use their smartphones for checking emails, other than taking calls. What’s more interesting is, there are more people who often check emails than browse the web for product searches. 

This might give you an advantage over your competitors if you have a huge list of emails to spread the message out. 

Moreover, people like to shop using their smartphones, but not all of them do this way. Traditional shoppers also check their emails to get hands-on information about products, services, deals, and coupons. 

This goes to show, that you should first think about setting up your email list before you head out to search digital marketers or SMS marketers to reach out to consumers.

The best part is, if your email marketing campaign got the success it needed, you don’t have to think about these expensive marketing options. 

Mobile-friendly Emails:

While starting an email campaign, keep in mind that they should be mobile-friendly:

• 48% of all the emails are opened on smartphones (or mobile devices)
• 68% of the decision-makers go through emails on mobiles
• 69% of the mobile users delete emails because they’re not optimized
• Only 11% of the email templates are optimized for mobile.

3. There are More Features in Email Marketing

Instead of the hype and fame of social media marketing, one cannot deny the limitations that, at times becomes a hindrance to product promotion. Limitations of characters and fields can make a good social media marketing campaign look average because of the short and concise message length. 

On the other hand, emails have no such limitations. In fact, it’s much more interactive. 

• You can use all HTML features
• The luxury to personalize the message
• You can include unlimited media

4. Email Marketing is Absolutely Affordable

Email marketing is a cheap marketing tactic as compared to other digital promotions. It’s quite close to meeting the expenses tight-budget businesses set for their marketing campaigns. 

Here’s a list of popular email marketing services with the potential to draw loads of customers. With just $10 – $30 per month, you can send 5000 emails to your customers every month. For a small business set up, that’s pretty high conversion probability.   

Email marketing lets you reach out to a wide audience with a few pennies per person. That’s a significant return on investment. Add the extra cost of creating email content, finding campaign opportunities, and other activities, and you’ll be pretty relaxed to find out that’s not beyond your budget. 

You can hire a professional email marketing agency with a small up-front investment. They’ll take all your email marketing responsibilities and bring in more potential customers. 

5. Yields Higher ROI 

Even better than the affordability factor; optimized and personalized emails offer a mind-boggling return on investment. Campaign monitor’s 2016 report shows emails offer 4400% ROI. That means, with $1 investment in email marketing, you’re likely to get $44 in return. 

Although the ROI percentage varies from business to business, it still looks pretty exciting to try out the email marketing strategy. 

Increase the revenue of the company:

Email marketing helps in revenue growth. When you reach out to the audience who is willing to get your product, there’s an even higher probability of conversion.

Drive more traffic:

It’s not always about flooding your website with visitors, quality traffic matters. Your email list suggests you have a list of willing customers and if you satisfy them once, they’ll be coming back for more. Don’t ignore, that they’ll be informing their friends about you. So, emails are potential traffic generators. 

Improve sales conversion:

With proper marketing emails, you can help your leads to pass through the sales funnel. These guidance emails will eventually convert your lead into customers. 

Increase brand awareness:

By sending emails, you’re not only promoting your brands. You’re also building a sound reputation among your subscribers. The way people perceive your brand depends a lot on the email messages they receive.  

6. Offers Integration with Other Marketing Tactics

Of all traditional marketing activities, even pre-sales, post-sales, and after-sales services, emails have a major role to play. A high percentage of marketers related to social media marketing tend to integrate emails with their social campaigns. 

Integrating Email Campaigns:

There are different ways to integrate the two channels:

• By adding social sharing button in your emails
• Send emails to targeted subscribers who mentioned you in their social media posts
• Grow your list through social media

Email Automation through Blogs:

Similarly, you can integrate emails to your website or blog. Then you can automate the process of sending emails to customers. The sooner you notify your prospects, the better it is, and it cannot be done without automation. There are automation platforms, like Zappier where you can easily create an automated email process without external help. 

Conclusion

Email marketing still has a high potential to grow small businesses into profitable entities. Small-to-medium entrepreneurs need to show more attention and focus on developing their email list and reaching out to their audience.