Why Email Marketing Is Important For Small Businesses

Email marketing has been called “dead” so often it should be a drinking game. But what many business owners ignore as too old school is your opportunity.

Email marketing is something people love to say is dead.

I think the first time I heard someone say it was Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in a 2010 keynote. In fact, there are so many people saying email marketing doesn’t work that we should make a drinking game out of it–if the advice wasn’t so harmful.

Email works.

And companies who walk away from it are also walking away from revenue: in fact, some of those companies could be walking away from their own ability to survive.

Am I exaggerating?

No, but before I get into that let’s first consider…

Is Email Marketing Still Effective?

Yes, but not just because I say so…

Email marketing delivers a serious return on investment: roughly $38 for every $1 spent. That’s a crazy ROI, and I’ll take that all day long.

B2B companies agree, and 40% of them say that email newsletters account for the largest portion of their content marketing success.

And it’s not just limited to B2B companies: 59% of B2C companies also find that email is their biggest source of ROI.

For retail, the opportunity is huge. Abandoned Cart rates average 75.6%. For retailers who choose to follow-up with these potential customers, the open rate on those emails is 48%, with a click-through-rate of 6.5%.

These abandoned carts represent $4 Trillion dollars in missed sales. With the proper remarketing and email follow-up systems, it’s estimated that $2.65 Trillion of these dollars could be recouped.

Imagine what that would do for the economy.

Bringing it closer to home: what would that mean for small businesses if they could boost their sales by simply following up with people who almost bought their products and services?

“But Nobody Opens Their Email Anymore”

I hope your competitors believe this, because if so, you’re going to get the lion’s share of the pie.

Here are some more stats to help the scales to fall from your eyes…

• Email is the way 73% of millennials prefer to be contacted by businesses
• A research study put out by Campaign Monitor found that 50% of the people surveyed tend to check their email 10 or more times per day
• 99% of consumers look at their email at least once per day

Back to the Importance of Email Marketing For Small Businesses

At this point, we know a few things…

1. Successful businesses lean heavily on email marketing for their revenues
2. Email campaigns work for B2B and B2C businesses
3. The much-ballyhooed “Millennials” prefer to be contacted via email
4. Almost all consumers look at their email daily (or multiple times per day)

That’s strong stuff.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that companies that ignore email marketing are at a minimum leaving significant money on the table; at worst, they could be guaranteed a “Store Closing” notice in their future.

99% of consumers check their email at least once per day Click To Tweet

And perhaps even more important than the obvious money side of the email marketing equation is the opportunity business owners have to connect with their customers and build relationships.

Relationships are the key to your company’s success, and email is the key to your relationships.

Three Ways To Grow Your Company

Jay Abraham famously identified three ways to grow your company:

1. Acquire new customers
2. Increase the size of the order your customers make
3. Increase the frequency your customers order

Of those three options, acquiring new customers is what most businesses focus on–and it’s the most expensive and least effective action they could take.

Acquiring a customer costs 5x more than keeping one, so why not sell more products to the customer who’s already happily enjoying one of your products and services?

Focus on selling to the customers you already have, and you’ll most likely grow faster than any of your front-end customer acquisition efforts.

But what does this look like with email?

How Email Marketing Factors Into Company Growth

We’ve touched on a few of the email marketing methods earlier in this email, but let’s list them out for ease of reference:

1. Onboarding Campaigns. Introduce the prospect or customer to your company’s universe. Onboarding Campaigns can be sent to newsletter subscribers, new customers, and even old customers who bought a new product–the point is to introduce them to your company, show what’s in it for them for doing business with you, perhaps give some instruction, and give them an opportunity to buy your products (or buy at a higher level if they’ve already purchased).
2. Nurture Campaigns. I think of these email campaigns as goodwill-builders. You always have something they can buy, but that’s not the purpose of the email. The purpose is to show them something interesting about what you do: this could be a product, this could be a new or unique way to use a product, it could be industry news, answering FAQs, showing behind-the-scenes at your company, whatever. This is relationship-building, not selling, and there should be something in it for them to read it.
3. Launch Campaigns. In the Internet Marketing world, launch campaigns have a certain meaning. Although emails are a big part of IM product launches, with 36 emails, NLP copywriting headlocks, etc., this is more of a quick sales campaign. It could take place over the course of a week, two weeks, or a month: the timeline doesn’t matter as much as the content. Launch Campaigns are all about building up interest and selling a product.

Any campaign I write for my company or for a client falls into one of the above three buckets, and each of them can be profitable.

There is no industry I’ve come across that can’t use each of the above email sequences. Each of them builds the relationship between the company and its customers–yes, even the sales emails should be “relationship-building” events.

Which Email Sequence Are You Implementing In Your Business Right Now?

At this point, you’ve seen enough stats to indicate that email marketing is far from dead. In fact, if you’re not using it your company’s success could be at risk.

So my question to you is this…

If you don’t have an onboarding, nurture, or launch sequence in place, when are you going to write them?

The time is now, my friend.

I’ll write a case study so you can see where the rubber meets the road with these sequences.

But this article should get the wheels turning for you.