eCommerce
6 Benefits of email marketing for small businesses

6 Benefits of email marketing for small businesses

Is email marketing dead?

benefits of email marketing

We can see why you would think so, especially with all the latest marketing trends indicating that voice search, smart chats, live videos, augmented reality and virtual reality offer so much more in terms of engagement and conversion.
The death of email marketing as a top flight marketing method is not true according to a 2019 report from Smart Insights. Email marketing is still going strong, infact this decades-old marketing method is one of the most effective channels for marketing your business. In this blog post we will look at 6 benefits of email marketing which could help your business grow:

1.Drive sales
2.Additional traffic
3.Save time & money
4.Instant impact
5.Develop your brand
6.Build stronger relationships

Email marketing is in effect a digital version of direct mail marketing. Email is a much faster, mobile and efficient way of keeping in touch with your customers. What’s more, email marketing isn’t just for the big budget retailers, it is seen to be the best form of marketing for small businesses with small budgets too! Let’s look at each of these benefits in more detail.

Drive sales

A study by Econsultancy; Marketing Week’s sister company indicates that email marketing generates around £29bn of retail sales annually and this is excluding offline sales that are influenced by emails.
According to Shopify 77% of shoppers have made a spontaneous impulse purchase and email marketing is great for taking advantage of this behaviour. It allows customers to purchase an item within a few clicks – with research showing that less clicks mean better conversion rates this is a very good thing!
Effective use of email marketing using optimised content and calls to action have been shown to help drive sales and offer conversion rates which out-perform many other marketing methods.

Additional traffic

Creating short article snippets in your newsletter with a link to your website or blog to read more could increase traffic to your website or blog. So, for example an email provides you with a few tips on how to decorate your living room but to find out more you must click the call to action button which will lead you to the rest of the article.

Save time & money

We all know what it’s like to be rushed off your feet and not have enough time to do the important things. With email marketing you can save both time and money. Unlike traditional methods of direct marketing such as print & direct mail, email saves you money on printing and postage costs.

With many email marketing software packages, you will be able to set up an automated email which is sent to the user once they take action, so for example if a new user signs up to your newsletter they will automatically get a welcome email. This gives you back more time as you only need to create the welcome email once rather than creating and sending an individual email every time a user signs up to your newsletter. Scheduling your emails also gives you the ability to create your email campaign when you are free to send out at a date and time that you prefer.

Instant impact

Getting into someone’s inbox is a bit like meeting someone for the first time! So, you want to make sure that your newsletter captures their attention in an instant by creating email that requires the user to take immediate action.

Develop your brand

How do you want your customers to view your company? If you have not already done so, create a brand vision board and brand guidelines, this will help you stay true to your brand when sending out regular updates and help grow your brand image.

Build stronger relationships

Customers like to know that they are acknowledged, and newsletters are a good way of connecting with your customers. One of the important things with email marketing is that you already have an engaged audience as your customers have signed up to your newsletter because they are interested in finding out more about your business. It’s important that you build this relationship with your customers by sending them the latest updates, sales, tips and so on.

For even more benefit, make sure you share your social media profiles on the emails you send out. eCommerce websites don’t have the luxury of having a sales person readily available, if your potential customers are able to interact with you or your staff via social media or a chat box on any landing pages within your website you use for your email campaign, this can act as a useful gauge of trustworthiness for your business.

Email marketing from Intelligent Retail

Are you an existing customer and interested in email marketing? If so contact our friendly team on 01635 517903 or email [email protected] to find out about our email marketing services.