6 Benefits of Email Marketing to Scale Your Small Business
If you aren’t leveraging email marketing to scale your business, you could be doing yourself a disservice.
Email is one of the most lucrative marketing channels you can use, earning an impressive $42 for every $1 spent (that’s a 4,200% return on investment). In fact, according to research conducted by McKinsey, email marketing leads to 3X more conversions than social media.
Even with these impressive statistics, many small business owners aren’t leveraging the power of email to promote their business. In fact, research shows that the majority of small businesses don’t use email marketing. If you fall within this segment, it may be time to revise your digital marketing strategy.
Below, we dive into how several email marketing benefits can help attract the right customers, land more sales, and ultimately scale your business. Plus, we’ll explore some user-friendly, affordable tools that can help small business owners like you launch your first email marketing campaign.
6 Email Marketing Benefits Every Small Business Owner Should Know
As a small business owner, you may often find yourself short on time, money, and personnel. Fortunately, the right email marketing strategy can help you earn more sales in less time. Below we dive into six benefits of email marketing every business owner should know.
1. It Won’t Drain Your Budget
Unlike paid advertising, like Google Ads or print advertisements, email marketing won’t drain your budget. In fact, many trusted email marketing platforms offer cost-effective or even free plans to help first-time email marketers get up and running.
In fact, Gumbamail, an email marketing platform that works with your existing Google account, offers a free plan to small business owners. As you ramp-up your email marketing efforts, you can access all of Gumbamail’s tools for less than $9 a month, easily fitting within your budget.
2. It’s Easy to Learn
Unlike social media marketing, SEO, or digital advertising, email marketing comes with a very small learning curve attached. Social media platforms and Google are constantly tweaking their algorithm, making it increasingly difficult for small businesses owners to get in front of potential customers. Email marketing, on the other hand, offers an incredibly high deliverability rate — usually between 80-95% — and doesn’t use an algorithm (sounds nice, doesn’t it?).
Plus, many marketing automation platforms are incredibly easy to learn. With Gumbamail, it takes mere minutes to install the plugin, build your email list, and start drafting your first campaign. Plus, with Gumbamail’s easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder, you can send gorgeous, custom-branded email newsletters in minutes.
3. It Gets Qualified Leads to Sales
Experts say that it can take eight touch points to (finally) land a sale. If you’re relying on an in-house sales team to attract more customers, you’ll find it’s nearly impossible to scale your business.
That’s where email marketing comes in.
Email marketing allows you move unqualified leads down the sales funnel, until it warrants a face-to-face conversation with a sales rep. By creating automated nurture campaigns, you can educate prospects on your mission and values, products and services, and past client relationships. That way, your brand stays top-of-mind when a new customer is ready to convert. Once a potential customer buys in to your unique offering, you can alert a sales rep.
To create automated drip campaigns, you’ll need an email marketing provider that allows you to schedule campaigns in the future. Fortunately, Gumbamail comes with built-in scheduling features so you can create campaigns in advance.
4. It Allows You to Pinpoint the Right Messaging
Have you ever come away from a prospect conversation thinking, “Wow, that certainly could have gone better”? And yet, you can’t quite pinpoint where the conversation went wrong?
Many times, business owners and sales reps strictly rely on their own intuition to craft their messaging strategy. Unfortunately, this guessing game could come at a detriment to your business.
Email marketing allows you to put cold, hard metrics behind your messaging strategy. With email, you can A/B test subject lines, body copy, or even email templates to see which performs best with your target audience. Fortunately, Gumbamail comes with a built-in reporting dashboard where you can track open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, to see different campaigns perform with your audience.
5. It Can Increase Your Website Traffic
If you want to increase brand awareness, you need to build your website traffic. Higher web traffic allows you to reach more people, thereby increasing your pool of potential customers. In addition, higher web traffic increases your authority and relevance in the eyes of Google, which improves SEO (i.e., you’ll move up the ranks in search results).
To give your web traffic a boost, be sure your main call-to-action (CTA) links to your website. A CTA could link to a recently published blog post, new e-commerce products, or a case study discussing a happy, loyal customer. By sending valuable, relevant content to your list on a regular basis, it helps build trust while increasing your web traffic.
To increase web traffic, be sure to use an email marketing software that comes with pre-designed email templates. Gumbamail offers 800+ templates that can be easily customized to fit your brand. Drop a button into the bottom of your email, add your own fonts and color palette, and link to valuable content to drive traffic toward your website.
6. It Helps You Build Relationships at Scale
One of the biggest advantages of email marketing is its ability to forge connections with your contact list. Plus, unlike traditional sales methods, email allows you to deepen these customer relationships at scale.
Think about it: If you’re a sales rep, you cold call a prospect, host a client dinner, or write a new customer a handwritten thank-you note. While all of these can help you forge a relationship with the customer, they come with one, jarring drawback: They’re not scalable.
Email marketing, on the other hand, allows you to write personalized content at scale to your email subscribers. For example, Gumbamail’s content marketing tools allow you to use custom merge tags to personalize your messaging. Rather than writing a generic, automated email to your entire audience, you can use merge tags to address the customer’s name in the salutation, reference their recent buyer history in the body, or even suggest a new product they might be interested in. That way, a promotional email reads like a personal message from a friend, rather than a sales pitch.
Use Gumbamail to Launch Your Email Marketing Strategy
Email is more lucrative than other forms of marketing. With email, you can build brand recognition, deliver qualified leads to sales, increase web traffic, and deepen your connection with your target audience.
To accomplish all of the above, you’ll need the right tools. Fortunately, Gumbamail is the user-friendly email marketing platform built exclusively for small business owners. Gumbamail works in conjunction with your existing Gmail account, helping you get up and running in mere minutes. Plus, Gumbamail comes with 800+ pre-designed email templates, a drag-and-drop email builder, built-in reporting metrics, and custom merge tags. Finally, Gumbamail comes with free and affordable pricing options, fitting perfectly within your budget.
Ready to see how Gumbamail can transform your email marketing strategy? Download the plugin to get started.