5 Powerful Benefits of Email Marketing for Small Businesses

Most well-crafted marketing campaigns will seek to elicit a range of reactions from the target audience.

This article was originally published on dashingmail.com

Sure, today's hyper-digital marketing environment does present many ways for small businesses to connect with their audiences online. Which method of marketing one chooses, in many cases, largely depends on the nature of your business and the type of audience you seek.

Different businesses employ various ways to communicate with their customers. Methods ranging from social media marketing to radio ads, and everything in between.Most businesses, however, have found Email marketing to be a consistently over-performing marketing channel as far as return on investment ( ROI) is concerned.

Let's take a look at the five main reasons every small business should consider having an email marketing strategy.

It is cost-effective

The cost-benefit factor of email marketing is perhaps the most attractive of all. The average marketer sees a 3800% return on investment (ROI) with email marketing. That is $38 in revenue for every $1 spent, According to the Direct Marketing Association. No need for postage costs, Ad rates, or any other peripheral costs associated with other forms of marketing. Email marketing provides a straightforward path for marketers and businesses of all sizes to connect with their audiences directly.

Shareability

Most well-crafted marketing campaigns will seek to elicit a range of reactions from the target audience. Some are super obvious - "Call Now", and others quite subtle. Email marketing campaigns, however, tend to have the natural ability to get folks to share what they find appealing. Most audiences will share killer promotions from their favorite retailer with their friends. Others will forward an interesting article to a number of people. The "Shareability" factor is made even easier because of the in-built tools associated with most email clients. As a small business owner, you can add social media tools and provide incentives to encourage even more sharing of your emails.

Can be personalized

A great strategy to sustain your small business and make your customers feel valued is by sending them personalized messages. Most email clients such as Dashingmail provides a whole host of tools to allow you to personalize email messages for a large number of recipients. You can really show your customers how valuable they are to your business by using their names in emails, as well as birthdays, anniversaries, etc. A recent study conducted by Experian found that personalized emails had 29 percent higher open rates and 41 percent higher click rates than emails without any personalization.

Seamless Customer retention

Email marketing allows you to send regular, relevant content/messages to your existing and prospective customers. This constant communication helps retain customers and build deep relationships.

Also, it helps to regain any customers that may have fallen off the network and attract them back to your business. You can do this by customizing and personalizing messages such as “curated just for you” or “we miss you”-type messages. These emails help members of your audience feel appreciated and encourages future transactions.

Another way of regaining and retaining customers is by offering discounts or giveaways. Flash sales and offers of "Free Shipping" are used successfully across various industries. In a 2014 case study, Red Door Interactive said that a free shipping offer had increased e-commerce orders by some 90 percent.

Scalability

Due to the fact that most email marketing platforms allow you to send out massive amounts of messages for a relatively low price, email is one of the few forms of marketing in which you can reach out to a large number of prospects while keeping costs at bay.

One can start out by sending out messages to just a handful of folks and work to steadily grow your audience to several thousand for mere pennies on the dollar. Most platforms will start a user off at $0 and only start to charge when your contacts start to reach into the thousands. Dashingmail, for example only charges $16/ month to allow messages to be distributed to up to 5000 subscribers.