Emails are one of the best tools to skyrocket a small business. If you are wondering “Why is email marketing important for a small business” — well there’s a multitude of reasons.
There are a lot of statistics based on thorough research that show the power of email marketing.
Did you know that the total number of emails sent daily over the last decade is exponentially soaring? The numbers are expected to increase by roughly 71 billion daily by 2025 — which is a lot!
The current ROI of using email is astonishing. Research suggests that for every 1$ spent on email marketing, you can expect an average ROI of 42%.
What’s more, the percentage of marketers in the e-commerce personalizing their emails rose from 38% in 2019 to whooping 60% in 2020.
Email is also a versatile and conversion-driving, straightforward marketing channel. One example of that versatility is email signature marketing.
It works by utilizing the space in your signatures and offers a lot of creative ways to effectively boost your marketing efforts. This is ideal for advertising and promotional purposes and it offers enough space for customization..
Now, let’s get to the point and discuss the benefits of email marketing.
Benefits of email marketing
Table of Contents
Email marketing can be used for a myriad of purposes so there are many types of it such as:
- Re-engagement email campaigns
- Newsletters
- Welcome email campaigns
- Lead nurturing email campaigns
- Dedicated email campaigns
- Seasonal email campaigns
- Thank-you emails
Email marketing strategy depends on the company’s size and the industry. For smaller businesses, email marketing can be beneficial when starting out. It will also help you build strong foundations of your small business by:
- Helping boost sales
- Strengthening customer relationships
- Building or reinforcing online presence and brand awareness
- Cost-effectiveness of email campaigns
- Significantly higher ROI when compared to other marketing channels
Let’s see exactly how to use emails to raise the bar high in your niche.
1.1. Use email marketing to boost sales
Among many intelligent applications for email marketing, boosting sales certainly is one of the most important. Email format offers many areas that you can use for promotion and advertising, which can help drive more sales.
When we analyze the email format, we can easily identify these integral elements:
- Subject line — use it to intelligently put bits of information that showcase a benefit from making a purchase from your brand or company
- The body of the email — this is a great space you can use to write a convincing sales copy and reinforce it with rich graphics like images, video, or interactive graphs & figures
- CTA or Call to Action — email body also offers a lot of space for you to position CTAs across it. You can use effective and sales-promoting CTA’s to convert readers and drive sales
- Graphic elements — including images, audio & video formats can help you attach important sales-boosting elements like video or audio testimonials.
When you leverage these elements the right way, you’ll be able to skyrocket your sales efforts.
Here are some of the benefits of email marketing for boosting sales:
- Emails offer a great foundation for personalization and personalization is proven to drive sales. Just ask yourself — “Would you rather buy a product you see for the first time from a random salesperson or from a friend?” The answer is pretty obvious – your friend. You’d feel more secure and confident when buying from them.
- With the right open and click-through rates, you can efficiently drive traffic to your eCommerce store for example
- Email marketing is cost-effective
- There are a lot of tools you can use to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns. Analysis like this can help you obtain valuable insights and discover what works & what doesn’t work.
1.2. Build strong customer relationships
All thriving businesses recognize the power of strong customer relationships. here are a lot of channels and strategies to strengthen them. One of the most versatile ones is email marketing.
It can reinforce your brand presence & awareness while improving your customer relationships. It works by using emails for a myriad of purposes that help build trust, engage communication and show them you care.
You can use it to:
- Announce new products
- Share important updates — new benefits, features, partnerships your business made
- Keep in touch on a weekly basis — for example, send them some relevant E-commerce news, industry breakthroughs, and global updates
- Thank your customers
- Give a warm welcome to your customers
You can also send automated emails that get triggered each time someone:
- Buys a product from your E-commerce store
- Browses for certain categories for a predefined interval of time — i.e. looking at child sneakers category so you can schedule emails to recommend the products. You can even send them personalized forms that they can fill out per their interests & preferences. With it, you’ll be able to send them additional emails with specific recommendations based on those forms.
Email marketing can be used as an additional, relationship-building channel apart from social media. For example, you can use social media for the daily engagement of your customers & audiences. Likewise, use emails to announce new products, offer birthday or seasonal discounts, etc.
2. Email marketing metrics for a small business
After discussing the benefits of email marketing, let’s take a look at its metrics. These will give you a picture of how effective your email marketing efforts are. It is an essential part of every successful email marketing campaign.
Some of the most important metrics for email marketing are:
- Open rate
- Spam
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
- Engagement rate
- Forwarding rate
2.1. Open rate
Open rate is a widely used metric that shows the percentage of opened emails from your email campaign. It represents the ratio of the number of opened emails by the total number of emails delivered.
Notice that we used the word “delivered” instead of “sent” because not all emails will hit their destination – the mailbox of your recipients. This is due to bounce rates, which significantly affect the deliverability of your emails.
The most important thing that will define the success of opened emails is a subject line. That’s why you should improve your subject lines if your emails have a low open rate.
2.2. Spam
One of the golden rules of email marketing is —to avoid being spammy at all costs. We all know how annoying and time-wasting spam can be. It flags the sender and puts a barrier on opening emails from them in the future.
Furthermore, the spam-preventing industry and ISPs are constantly deploying new solutions to detect and eliminate spam. That’s why you would want to remove all things that can make your emails appear spammy. Of course, even if you do your best, some recipients will still mark your emails as spam.
The spam score is one of the important metrics that will show you the % of your emails that have been marked as spam. You want to keep your spam score as low as you can and here is some advice to do so:
- Don’t buy email lists with contacts — build your own list instead
- Always aim to create relevant and value-adding content
- Stay updated on anti-spam laws and implement those regulations in your email campaigns
- Invest in a third-party sender accreditation certificate
- Send small batches of emails instead of bulk-sending them
2.3. Click-through rate
This metric is also referred to as CTR and is very important to see the % of recipients that clicked on the links in your emails. The higher the CTR, the more traffic you’ll have on your website, which can result in more sales.
The most important factor that influences CTR is the quality of the copy in your emails. Email copy along with properly positioned and designed graphics can skyrocket your CTR. You should send informative, valuable, and useful content to your customers & recipients. Offer them something of value such as discount codes, personalized offers, or an ebook.
The main goal is to craft the copy that will add value to them and match their interests, preferences, and personas.
2.4. Conversion rate
The conversion rate is hugely related to the ROI of your email campaigns. It measures how much of the delivered emails resulted in a successful conversion. That conversion can revolve around specific actions you want your recipients to take after reading your email. For example, it can be purchasing a product or making an account on your eStore.
Conversion rate hugely depends on other metrics we mentioned, like the open rate and the CTR. That implies that you should first maximize those and then focus on conversion rate specifically. A great way to boost the conversion rate of your email marketing campaigns is to have a stellar CTA (Call-to-Action). We’ll get into more details of how to make a great CTA that drives conversions.
Unfortunately, some recipients might take the opposite action and unsubscribe instead of converting. This is measured by a metric called the unsubscribe rate and it shows the % of recipients that unsubscribed.
2.5. Engagement rate
he engagement rate is a metric that unites some of the metrics we already discussed. It is the representation of how engaging your emails are. To explain it in detail, let’s summarize what we know about email marketing metrics:
- Open rate shows how much interest your emails awoke in your recipients.
- The CTR shows to which extent your recipients acted on your copy and CTAs
- Unsubscribe rate shows how engaging your email campaigns are in the long run. It basically measures how well your email campaigns can attain the interest and engagement of your recipients.
Engagement rate represents the sum of all these metrics (and more). To measure the engagement rate of your email marketing campaigns you can use the email marketing benchmark.
It is also a good idea to connect your email marketing metrics with your eCommerce store metrics. This will allow you to see the bigger picture and thoroughly analyze the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
3. Tips & Tricks to skyrocket a small business with email marketing
In addition to everything we covered so far, here are some tips to skyrocket your small business email marketing.
3.1. How to create a strong subject line that draws attention?
A strong subject line that attracts a reader to open an email is a must. It needs to grab attention from the start without being pushy or appearing as a clickbait. To craft a stellar subject line, you need to:
- Know and understand the interests, preferences, and problems of your audience
- Personalize it as much as you can
- Showcase value inside the email
- Create a sense of urgency
All of these tips need to be interwoven the right way. That means using the right keywords inside a sentence that’ll have the desired effect. That effect revolves around engaging recipients to open the email and evoking a deep interest to discover what’s inside it.
Here are some tips:
- Keep the length of your subject lines around 60-70 characters
- Mention the benefit of opening your emails at the beginning
- Use your recipients’ names — “Paul, get the 40% discount on our clearance sale today!”
3.2. Conduct A\B testing
A\B testing is a great practice to determine which email versions vibe with your recipients the best way. That includes different nuances when it comes to:
- Email copy
- Graphical elements in the body
- CTA design
- Subject lines
- The position of all elements in an email — text copy, graphics, CTAs, etc.
Make sure to constantly conduct A\B testing as it can boost your email marketing efforts even when you’re doing great.
Here are some tips for effectively conducting A\B testing:
- Be detailed-focused and focus on small changes
- Use versions with and without images in the body of your emails
- Hyper-personalize whenever you can
- Experiment with different types of tones in your copy
- Make a different copy inside your CTAs, but make sure each version is clear enough
- Repeat A\B testing again and again
Read More: Follow These 4 Steps To Add Image To Email Template In Magento 2.
3.3. How to Personalize CTAs?
CTAs is that little button or text that serves the purpose of converting a reader after they’ve read your copy.
A CTA needs to invite the reader to take a specific action. That’s why it’s essential to clearly define your email marketing goals. Ask yourself what you want from your subscribers.
Do you want them to download an eBook, buy something, or just register for your newsletter?
After you’ve done this, find the best words to convey that meaning into your CTA copy. Try to make it as compelling and engaging as you can. It would be best to avoid generic CTA copy like these:
- “Download now”
- “Register today”
- “Buy now”
- “Sign-up for free
- “Get access”
Instead, use engaging CTAs like this:
- “Get this ultimate guide on email marketing now”
- “Skyrocket your small business today”
- “Buy Santa’s favorites”
- “Enroll me in your loyalty program”
- “Reserve your seat”
Finally, to make the most out of your CTA efforts you can utilize the power of email signature marketing. Email signature marketing revolves around using your signature for promotional, advertising, or marketing purposes.
Every business email should have a striking signature and give off the notion of confidence, positivity, and trustworthiness. It says a lot about the person who sent the email. It’s also what many people use to gauge the trustworthiness of the copy they read, the business behind the email, etc.
So why not use that space for an additional CTA or for boosting your business’s image in the eyes of your recipients?
With a striking design and appealing graphics that highlight important information, you can win over readers. In addition, put a CTA in your email signature to:
- Invite readers to contact you
- Invite them to schedule a presentation
- Offer them discounts on first purchases
- Offer them to book a demo
- Invite them to visit your website, sign up for your newsletter & blog
Final words
Email marketing is a great tool for boosting your marketing efforts for businesses of any size. For a small business, it is a tool that can give you the edge and set you towards the path of thriving.
In the beginning, it would be best to dedicate some time and resources to set everything the right way. That accounts for carefully planning your email marketing campaigns and defining clear and measurable goals.
Afterward, cross your fingers, launch it, and wait for the valuable information your metrics will provide. There can be a lot of trial and error but you will certainly hit the right formula by constantly adjusting and applying insights from your metrics.
