What is Email Marketing? 

Email Marketing is a powerful tool that small businesses can use to acquire, engage, and retain customers. It involves the use of emails to keep customers informed about what’s new in your business, limited time offers, product updates, and so much more. When done effectively, email is a powerful communication tool that can build relationships with potential customers and increase your sales efforts. 

A Little Bit of History 

The first marketing email was sent in 1978, resulted in $13 million in sales, and kicked off what has become one of the most highly used marketing channels even to this day. 

Given its early beginnings, email isn’t as shiny as some newer channels like messaging and social, but it is an effective way to build an owned audience that gets results. 

Below, we’ve outlined four types of popular email marketing campaigns and how they can be used to help your business grow. 

1. Email Newsletters 

One of the most common and popular email marketing campaigns are Email Newsletters. As a small business you can use an email newsletter to provide subscribers with helpful knowledge and tools. It is important to add value to your subscribers’ inboxes. 

2.Acquisition Emails 

Acquisition Emails can help your small business acquire customers who have opted to receive your emails but have not yet converted into customers.  By creating attractive offers and informative content you can show those in your email list the value of becoming an active customer. Acquisition emails are a great way to move leads through the conversion funnel faster, grow your business and drive additional revenue, and target users who have expressed some interest in what your business has to offer. 

3. Retention Emails 

By sending a message requesting feedback or an offer to subscribers who haven’t interacted with your business or emails campaigns lately, your small business can keep the lines of communication open. Retention Emails are a very useful email campaign strategy that can help you keep your hard-won customers. 

4. Promotional Emails 

Promotional Emails are a great way to drive sales, signups, and new product offerings for your small business.  Promotional emails include offers that entice and encourage your target to buy a new product/service. Use promotional emails to reward engaged subscribers with exclusive offers, drive new products or services to subscribers, and cross-sell products to your customer base. 

By implementing a successful email marketing campaign your small business can benefit greatly. Be sure to select the correct email marketing campaign to achieve your small business goals.  Keep in mind that when your customer/target finds your email very valuable they’re more likely to forward it and/or share it with others.  

Some of the benefits of email marketing include: 

• Cost- effective – the costs of email marketing can be much lower than many other forms of marketing. There are no advertising fees, printing or media space costs. 

• Permission-based – your marketing list will be made up of people who have actively chosen to receive email communications from you. Customers who are genuinely interested in your products and/or services are more likely to engage with your business. 
• Flexible design – email marketing can utilize plain text, graphics or attached files – whichever suits your message best. A choice of design options gives you scope to convey your business branding. 
• Scalable – email marketing can be used to reach large audiences or smaller targeted lists. 
• Personalization and segmentation – with email marketing you can personalize messages. You can also segment your marketing list, so that your customers receive messages from you that they are interested in – this will help boost their engagement with you. 
• Shareable – it’s easy for people to forward and share your email content, building your reputation by word-of-mouth or viral marketing. This may help influence new customers to become followers of your brand.  

• Conversions and increased sales – if you have a new promotion people can click on links and follow your call-to-action immediately. Email marketing is also effective at every stage of the buying process. 
• Measurable – you can evaluate the success of a campaign by using web analytics software. You can easily test different copy, subject lines and designs to see which is most effective. This allows you to optimize future campaigns. 
• Less intrusive – unlike telephone marketing, recipients can read your message at a time that suits them.  Customers can also update their preferences if they would like to receive different messages from you or unsubscribe if they feel they no longer want to receive your email communications. 
• Environmentally-friendly – email marketing is better for the environment than direct marketing by postal mail because nothing is printed. 
• Time-saving – through automation you can trigger emails to be sent to customers based on an action they have performed on your website – eg. send a welcome email when a user signs up to your website, or issue an email offering a discount incentive if user abandons an online shopping cart.  

• Real-time marketing – through email marketing you can connect with customers in real-time. Using automated triggers, such as website activity, recent purchase or shopping cart abandonment, you can reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right place and with the right offer.  

 
Your customers don’t give their information lightly, and — if used right — email marketing can be both a relationship-building and profit-building tool. 

Feel free to reach out if your small business needs assistance establishing or executing an email marketing campaign…We’re always happy to help!