5 Reasons to Use Email Marketing for Your Business

In my years as an online business owner, many entrepreneurs seem to be divided into two camps when it comes to the benefits of email marketing for business: they either love it or they loathe it.

Where do you fall?

If you don’t love email marketing as a solid foundation for relationship building and revenue within your business, it’s possible you’re unsure of the value nurturing your list can bring to your business for years to come. 

What Are the Benefits of Email Marketing?

Take a moment to think about what you want from your business: Maybe it’s transformation for your clients, maybe it’s to establish yourself as an expert, or maybe it’s revenue.

Chances are it’s a combination of all three. How do you accomplish those things?

Through marketing. 

Simply put, marketing is a way to promote and sell your products and services. Of course, there are several ways you are likely doing this whether on social media, guest spots, ads, or SEO strategy. If email marketing isn’t among your favorite ways to promote your business, it should be.

Email Marketing Is Low Cost

No matter where you are in your business from start up to a savvy six-figure CEO, money matters. You didn’t get where you are in business by being careless with your spending. 

Email marketing is low-cost, and even free, depending on the platform you choose. If you self-manage your email marketing, there is no need to outsource. However, if you find you are struggling to write to your list or if your time is better spent in other areas of your business, it might be a worthwhile investment to collaborate with someone to create your campaigns.

At minimum, your investment would be an email service provider, and some offer free or low-cost plans. One of my favorite companies with a free tier is MailerLite, as they offer features such as advanced automations, personalization, a/b testing, and segmentation. Both landing pages and email campaigns are easy to create with drag and drop editing. 

You Own Your Email List

No doubt social media is popular, and it can be a lot of fun! Stories, Reels, posts, Tweets, and more offer opportunities to share your content with broader audiences and make connections with new people. You can also leverage your social media to drive traffic back to your site.

So I’m not recommending you abandon your social media content plan. 

But social media has some downsides too.

You can’t control social media. The algorithm, who sees your posts, when they will see your posts, losing your account, or even when it goes off-line.

Growing and maintaining your email list allows you to have a curated audience of people who enjoy hearing from you and reading your updates. Plus, they are more likely to engage with your call-to-action.  

Email Allows Direct Communication with Your Audience

Studies show almost everyone has at least one email account, unlike social media where some users opt out of the platforms. Plus, people are likely to check their email at least once per day. 

Setting up your email automations and tags correctly can allow you to nurture relationships with people who sign up for your email list, peep at your products but don’t purchase (no spendy Facebook ads required), and share information they may be interested in.

You have endless opportunities to build relationships through marketing and remarketing with your email list.  

Email Marketing is a Way to Build Trust

Trust is one of the most important factors within all relationships, and business is no exception. 

As a business owner, you work hard to cultivate trust within your clients. After all, you want your clients to view you as reliable and credible when it comes to the services and the products you provide. 

If they invest time and money with you, will you continue to be there to offer the support you promise? Have others received valuable results as a result of following you and working with you?

Emailing consistently is one way to show you are reliable and stay top of mind when your clients are seeking the transformation you offer. Using segmentation and personalization is another way to increase the trust your clients have in your brand. 

If you’re worried that writing and selling all the time feels spammy to you and inauthentic to the brand you are hoping to create, you’re probably right (our intuition is good like that!). So be sure to include value and calls to action that lead to support other than sales. A VIP day for planning out your email content might be just what you need if you feel overwhelmed and unsure of planning your email marketing on your own. 

Email Marketing Adds to Your Revenue

The average ROI, or return on investment, is estimated to be 4200%! What?! That means for every $1 spent on email marketing, the estimated revenue for you is $42. [R]  While I am not a math genius, that seems like a pretty smart business decision to me! 

How does this happen?

Remember, people are more likely to work with businesses they know, like, and trust. If they have signed up for your email list, it means they are already interested in the content and value you have offered. They want you to be in their space, and they are considered warm leads who have already taken the step into your funnel toward being a client.

Taking advantage of your authentic voice, consistency, personalization, and segmentation through your email marketing continues to nurture the relationship further affirming the like and trust.  

How Do You Measure the Effectiveness of Your Email Marketing?

I’ll admit, I have never been a numbers girl (it’s true, I was even kicked out of my math class senior year because it was going to affect my GPA as I was applying to colleges). However, as a business owner, it’s important to understand your numbers and what they mean in the performance and health of your business. What’s going well? What can be improved? Are you meeting your goals? And how can you be more effective in your business? 

While there are several KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, you can track within your business, when it comes to the effectiveness of your email marketing, these are a few of my favorite (because the less math I have to do, the better): 

Revenue

As I said above, revenue matters when you are in business. Revenue is a key factor in determining the success of your campaign. To do this, you would take the sales generated from the campaign or email, subtract any marketing costs involved with that specific campaign, and then divide it by the cost.

As an example, if I ran an email campaign to my VIP Day service, generated $6000 in sales, subtracted any costs involved (which might just be my email service provider since I am writing and uploading the content myself or if you are outsourcing, maybe you’d subtract that fee, say $500). The difference is called a net return ($5500). That is then divided by the marketing costs number used above to determine my return on investment ($5500/$500 = 11%). 

Conversions

Conversion is another metric to consider when determining the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. It refers to the number of people who completed the desired action after reading your email.

Going back to my example above, I might want to measure the number of people who scheduled to work with me on a VIP Day after I sent an email sequence about the benefits, value, and process. 

Conversion rates vary per industry, but the average conversion is 2-5%.

To calculate your conversion rate, divide the number of people who completed the desired action by the number of people who received and opened the email campaign. For example, if you had 4 scheduled events as a result of your campaign divided by the total number of people the email was sent to, say 500, your conversion rate for that would be .8%, which is below average. 

Click-Throughs

Click-through is similar to conversion, except you are measuring the people who clicked your link instead of the people who actually completed the desired goal. So maybe they were enticed by your email and clicked the link for more information, but decided not to buy your product or service.

Calculating the click-through is also similar as you would divide the number of link clicks by the number of people who received and opened your email campaign. 

Knowing your click-through rate is an indication of what’s working and what isn’t. In other words, is your email copy engaging and enticing them to seek more information? You can understand your audience better and continue creating more personalized content for them. 

Like other metrics, click-through rates vary per industry and usually range between 1-5%.

List Growth

Growth is important to measure because all other metrics depend on your list size. When you are ready to launch and offer, your list size matters when setting your goals for enrollments and revenue. Of course, while numbers matter, it’s not simply the quantity you’ll want to focus on. You’ll want quality subscribers who are interested in your offers and engaged in your emails. 

To learn your list growth rate, use the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes, then divide that by the total number of email addresses on your list, and then multiply it by 100.

Unsubscribes? Early on I used to take it very personally when people left my email list. I’d be devastated that they didn’t like what I was sharing, and I would obsess about why they opted not to hear from me. Some sound advice I received and will pass on to you: You are not for everyone, and that’s okay. Just like you don’t want your social circle filled with people who would prefer not to spend time with you, your email list is the same. Invest in the relationships that matter and don’t worry about chasing the ones that don’t.

Next Steps

Email marketing for business can be an effective and efficient use of resources within your business. If done strategically and consistently, email is a channel to build relationships through personalized content, build trust and authority, and add to your revenue.

The data you collect through your email service provider such as open rates, conversions, click-through rates, and ROI can help you measure the health of your business as well as guide you in creating future content. 

Need support getting your email marketing to the next level? I offer personalized email marketing strategy sessions so you can learn to engage your audience authentically and boost your impact and revenue within the next 30 to 90 days!

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