Benefits of Email Marketing for small businesses

Email marketing basically means sending emails to potential or current customers and clients in order to educate them, build loyalty to your brand or to sell to them.

The lovely thing about your email marketing is that you own your mailing list. You fully control the content of it and how it is distributed.

The best practice way to think of your email marketing is that it is a good idea to target it at a very specific group of people. I’ve spoken about the importance of niche audiences before and I’ll do it again and again. The same applies to email marketing.

Don’t just have one huge list. Divide it into key audience types such as past customers and potential customers for example. Or alternatively you could choose a niche that is highly specific to the business you are running. For example a homewares company could divide it into people with an interest in home interiors and a list for gardening & outdoors for example.

So many small business owners have been catapulted into the world of e-commerce (selling online through the likes of Shopify or online marketplaces like Etsy). Email marketing is a really important tool for making sales online. The reality of social media is that you are firstly at the mercy of whether a robot decides whether your content will be seen. You then have to get the people to your website and if you manage it, those people may never return. It’s quite a high-energy & constant form of marketing (although it can be highly luctrative too – I’m a big advocate of it!).

I tend to describe email marketing lists as a good way to have a captive audience. If the people on your list signed up to hear from you then they must be quite genuinely engaged in what you do. It allows for an ongoing relationship over time. Sometimes business owners can be disheartened by low ‘open rates’ but actually, because they are quite an engaged & interested audience (and invested enough to give away their contact details), conversion to sale is likely to be quite high.

If you have an e-commerce store such as Shopify you can do really clever things like send reminders to people about their abandoned cart, or send follow-up emails to past customers. Equally, in a more basic way you can send a series of automated emails to your new subscribers without you having to lift a finger (after the initial setup of course!).

So, if you aren’t dabbling in email marketing yet I would encourage you to try it. Struggling? I’d love to try to help and you can get in touch here.