10 Reasons Why Email Marketing is Essential for Business
Email marketing is an incredibly powerful and effective marketing tactic with one of the highest ROIs, but we know that if you haven’t used it before, it can seem like a big and scary addition to your marketing strategy.
This is, once you have a basic understanding of the value of email marketing, a loose email marketing strategy to work from, and you’ve chosen an email marketing platform to work with— it stops being intimidating and starts being incredibly beneficial to your business. To help you put the weight of email marketing into perspective, we’ve listed the top 10 reasons why email marketing is important for business here.
Here’s the thing, though: After you read through this list, you’re gonna be feeling like, “Okay, YES! I need to use email marketing! How do I do it?!” So we recommend doing your 10-minutes-from-now self a favour and opening our “How To Create a Marketing Plan for your Business” post in a new tab right now!
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Reason #1 Email has a huge audience
Contrary to (somewhat) popular belief, email isn’t dead! It’s holding strong as a source of communication. In fact, over 90% of internet users use email! (That’s literally billions of people.) So, while it’s possible that not all your audience uses social media, it’s highly likely that they are using email.
Another stat to note: on average, people check their email 15 times a day. That gives you plenty of opportunity to get your message across to present and future clients!
Reason #2 Email has a sky-high ROI
While you might not think it, email marketing actually has a higher conversion rate than SEO, display ads, and social media channels.
So, it’s really smart to put time, a little money, and some effort into email marketing. According to Campaign Monitor, every $1 spent on email marketing generates $38, whereas $1 spent on Google Ads only generates an average of $2.
Reason #3 Consumers prefer email communication
When email was first introduced to the world, a lot of people thought it was just another fad. Man, were they wrong! Email is now one of the most popular forms of communication. Not only do 99% of people check their email every single day— it’s also their preferred way to receive updates from brands.
Reason #4 It’s great for audience segmentation
If you’re scratching your head wondering what “segmentation” is, don’t worry! We’ll start with a little Email Marketing 101. Segmentation simply means dividing your overall audience into smaller, most specific subgroups. Even though you likely have one overarching target audience, a lot of the people within that audience could probably be further divided based on their specific needs, wants, and pain points. (For instance, you own a health clinic and one subsection of your audience sees physiotherapists for rehab while the other sees kinesiologists for performance.)
Why is segmentation important? Because it makes your content more relevant to the people receiving it. Segmenting your email list lets you group these smaller, sub-sections of your audience together based on their similarities, and then send them messages and resources specifically for them. This makes your audience more likely to open emails and engage, which means that you’ll see a higher conversion rate. In fact, segmented and targeted campaigns make up 77% of ROI.
Ideally, you’ll use your website and social media to send more general messaging to your whole audience, and use email marketing for audience segmentation.
Reason #5 It’s a direct line to the consumer
Email marketing gives you a direct line to your reader, without any algorithms or private companies blocking your content or getting in your way
When you’re using social media platforms or leveraging SEO, you’re playing with the ever changing algorithms. Depending on a list of mystery criteria that you have no control over, some of your followers will see your social and blog posts, some will not. But with email marketing, the only thing you need to beat is the spam filter. (And, if you’re creating quality, informative content that is of value to your reader that shouldn’t be a problem.)
Reason #6 It allows for personalization
Most (if not all) email marketing platforms have the capacity to include each reader’s actual name in the subject line and body of your emails (as long as they provided it to you upon subscribing). This adds a level of personalization and connection to your reader that generates a 50% higher open rate, and increases sales by 20% when paired with targeted messaging.
Personalization within emails is so easy, and it’s a huge win for you as a business owner. Think about it: you can’t customize your website or social posts to welcome your readers by name!
Reason #7 It’s affordable
There are so many different email marketing platforms out there, with options for all budgets and business types. You generally get what you pay for, but a small, local business will always have fewer needs than an international company— so you can choose a platform and subscription level that suits your needs.
Unfortunately, quality email marketing platforms that allow for segmentation and automation aren’t free, but they are definitely worth the cost. When you look at how much you pay per subscriber in comparison to what you invest in social media, digital advertising, and other types of marketing— the cost is generally significantly less.
Related: With so many different email marketing platforms to choose from, it’s hard to know what’s best for you. Read our blog post Which Email Marketing Platform is Best for Canadian Small Businesses? to make the decision process easier.
Reason #8 It lets you automate and save time
The thing that we love MOST about email marketing is that you can mobilize the robot army to do the work for you. That means that instead of having to constantly create fresh content and engage like you do on other platforms, you can write your emails ONCE, set them to automatically send when you want them to, and then kick back and relax. (Or, more likely, move on to the other parts of your business that need your attention!)
Email marketing uses sequences: series of emails that are sent out to targeted groups of people who are subscribed to your email newsletter. If you take the time (or pay someone) to set up these sequences once, automation will take care of the rest.
An effective email strategy will have a few sequences set up and automated (typically a welcome sequence, an education/engagement sequence, and a sales sequence), which are “triggered” to start sending after readers take specific actions (which you determine). You’ll still want to do some optimization and testing (see below!) but you don’t need to check your whole strategy every single day like you need to with social media and similar channels.
Reason#9 It provides measurable data
Every part of your email marketing strategy is measurable. You can see insights like:
- How many emails you sent
- When people opened them
- How many people opened versus clicked
- Which links they clicked on
This means you can learn so much about your audience and what they want from you. You can also use campaign tagging with your Google Analytics to attribute purchases or leads directly to your email marketing efforts.
With these effective analytics available to you, you can measure exactly how many dollars of revenue came from your investment in email marketing, and make the most strategic decisions for your business going forward.
Reason #10: It’s great for testing and optimization
Because you have access to so much data, you can test and optimize your email marketing. This will help you increase your open rates, click-through rates and increase your overall engagement.
You can test which emails, subject lines, or campaigns get the best results. Using A/B testing, you can send two different variations of any given email to two different, smaller groups of subscribers, and see which one is most effective. Then, when you send your email to the whole list, you’ll know which one has the best chance of getting you results!
Some things we love to test with our clients:
- Different subject lines and how they impact open rates
- Different call-to-actions and how they impact click rates
- Different email send times and how they impact open rates
- Different opening sentences and message tone and how they impact click rates
When you test and optimize your email sequences and strategy, you’re able to learn more about your audience and improve the performance of your email strategy.
If you’re curious about what your clients are most receptive to and want to try A/B testing yourself, check out this great tutorial for how to A/B test your email campaigns.
Next step: Email marketing mastery!
Email marketing is a must for any business owner who wants to keep up in the digital marketing world, but there’s a few more things you can do to help your business thrive! Check out our posts about why a blog and a professional website are all the building blocks of a comprehensive strategy.
Get data-driven marketing insights and exclusive resources right to your inbox.
Don’t just market more. Market better. Get exclusive access to resources and insights that introduce you to the once-confusing world of data-backed marketing.
