There is no doubt that permission based email marketing can be extremely powerful. And yet it is so easy to get started with very minimal costs and quickly end up enjoying the kind of returns that can be mind boggling. There are really plenty of benefits any business can enjoy from this amazing marketing method. Here we list 12 of them.
1. Sales Will Skyrocket
Email marketing works and done properly will always increase sales. And usually it does this rather dramatically. Actually other forms of marketing are mostly like firing shots in the dark while aiming in the general direction of your prospects. With email promotions you have already locked on to your prospects with laser precision because all the people on your list are already pre-qualified hot prospects for your product or service.
Email marketing pros usually regularly create time limits for purchases and time sensitive special offers. This usually wipes out one of the most common obstacles to sales which is procrastination flies. The result is that a vast majority of people on any list, that were previously hesitant, will end up buying right away.
Human nature is such that people will always need a reason to buy now and when you create a sense of urgency, they will have no reason to delay their purchase any further. How can you possibly fail to dramatically increase your sales using clever email marketing?
2. Top of The Mind In Customers
When a customer needs to buy he will usually end up with the brand that is at the top of his mind. Expensive prime time TV ads are designed to do just this. However email marketing will do it a lot better and at a tiny fraction of what a company would spend on a single prime time slot on Television. One of the reasons why email is much more effective is it helps the seller to build a personal relationship with their prospects through the regular useful information that they send out to them. That’s something that you cannot do with any other medium.
3. Lots of Repeat Business
Assuming that you have a useful product that satisfies the basic requirements of your customers, there is still always a high possibility that they will never buy from you again. And that’s mostly because in the extremely crowded marketplace of today they will quickly forget about you as dozens of other heavily advertised alternatives crowd you out of their minds. With email marketing that is unlikely to happen because they are regularly receiving information and updates from you. That is why you will always be guaranteed lots of repeat business.
How can you possibly go wrong with such a high customer retention rate?
4. Easy To Establish Authority
Properly executed email marketing will easily give you lots of instant credibility and authority in your industry. Thanks to the regular tips and news you will be sending out which will establish your thought leadership in your sector. That’s a very enviable and powerful position in marketing because it will automatically give you the kind of influence rights that your competitors do not have and will never get with your prospects.
Sadly a common mistake made by some email marketers is to focus on sending out sales messages with very little other useful content. Always provide useful tools and advice instead and you’ll gain all the authority you need to wipe out all competition.
5. Effective In Building Relationships With Leads
Email is a very personal communication tool. And so it is hardly surprising that well thought out email newsletters will always create deep emotional links with customers and prospects. Folks will never buy anything from strangers and will instead always opt for the familiar and the business or brand that they have already build a relationship with. Email allows a business to very effectively build a relationship with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of prospects at the same time. That is pretty powerful and the reason why email marketing remains so very effective in selling virtually anything.
Just be careful to always add value in the lives of your prospects and the results will surely exceed your wildest expectations.
6. Very Low Cost
Everybody knows that mainstream advertising is horrendously expensive. And if you want to be really effective as you face mounting competition out there you will need to spend even more. Clearly it is the preserve of Fortune 500 corporations with deep pockets. But even then it is getting less effective by the day as wary consumers bombarded with advertisements every waking hour continuously find new ways to shut out these costly messages. For example, chances are that you usually mute the sound or flip channels when there is a commercial break on your favorite TV show.
In sharp contrast blasting out messages to your multitudes of prospects costs next to nothing but continues to be very effective. Admittedly you will have to pay for your internet connection as well as the auto responder and the email marketing management services you will require. However when you factor in your returns the cost of getting each customer will come down to tiny fractions of pennies.
7. Quality Customer Database And Segmentation
The most important component in email marketing is your email list. A quality list will give you quality results and high sales every time. Good email marketing will always give you a list of prospects that are your hottest leads. With every message that you send out you will easily be able to track the results. For instance you will know how many people actually opened your email and how many clicked on each hyperlink on your email.
Actually you will get all the information you need to continuously segment your customers according to preferences based on their tracked behavior. This is very useful in marketing because segmentation allows you to tailor your product or service much more specifically to your individual clients which will always produce more sales and profits for your business. Compare this to all the expensive research and focus groups you would have had to set up in the bricks and mortar world. And after all the bills are paid you would extremely lucky to get half the information that is so easily and cheaply accessible in email marketing.
8. You Can Easily Track Sales For Higher Profits
Why is tracking sales so profitably important? The answer is simple. By knowing where your customers are coming from and how you got them in the first place you can dramatically improve your marketing efforts. All you will need to do is shift to what is working and abandon what is not working. You can also constantly improve on what is working for you to get even better results.
You can also create offers and tweak products so that they are better suited to customers all based on previous purchases that they have made.
Alternatively you can quickly and instantly test various key aspects of your offer like pricing. Test two different prices to see which delivers the biggest profits. Product “A” may sell less units than product “B” because it is a higher price but when you calculate your margins you could well find that product A is still much more profitable. In a few hours you will end up getting the kind of information that usually takes years of experience and trial and error to obtain.
This is one of the really magical things about email marketing. Offline and with other forms of marketing this is very difficult and in some cases impossible to achieve.
9. Very Easy To Go Global With Email
Ordinarily to go global you would need to make expensive trips abroad or gain useful contacts in each individual country you want to sell to. Email marketing easily overcomes this obstacle because you are selling directly to your consumer with no need for a middleman.
It is also cheap because there is absolutely no difference in cost between sending out a message within your own country and sending one to a remote town on the other side of the world.
Different markets will tend to have different cultures and demands. This is hardly a problem with email marketing since all you need to do is to tailor and design your offers appropriately for the different markets.
A simple test email campaign can help you understand a new market intimately without having to make a substantial investment on blind faith and limited information that you might end up regretting.
There is no doubt that marketing professionally with email is the easiest way for your business to go global. It is efficient and affordable in giving you the opportunity to reach audiences and markets you otherwise would not have been able to touch.
10. The Best Return on Investment (ROI)
According to a 2011 Direct Marketing Association study email marketing gives a return of a whooping $41 for every $1 invested.
This underlines how cost effective this marketing method can be, more so in comparison to other techniques out there. For starters email marketing is the most effective way of achieving customer retention. Everybody knows how expensive it is to acquire a new client. With email you will be able to seamlessly continue selling to the same customer again and again once they are on your list. The individual return from a single customer over many months and years is phenomenal.
And then there is the fact that ordinarily with other tools and mediums you will need to make a substantial investment before you can even attempt to measure your initial results.
It is also easy with email marketing to start small and quickly build up your investment by reinvesting part of your profits in say PPC (pay per click) ads to build your email list of prospects much quicker.
11. Time and Effort Dramatically Reduced
Once you have set up your auto responder the whole process of signing up new prospects to your list is automated. You can even create messages and schedule them for a whole year or more so that your prospects receive weekly messages without you have to lift a finger.
When you need to send out messages with the latest news it will only take only a few minutes to write it and then with a simple click of a button it will instantly reach all the people on your list even if your list has hundreds of thousands of names.
Not to mention the fact that email templates can be reused or even re-purposed with very limited additional effort on your part.
Personalization of messages increases response and yet this is easily automated using most email software packages.
12. Better Target And Higher Conversions
It is so easy in email marketing to use an individual’s contact data to adjust your messaging so that it has a much higher level of relevance. Imagine what a prospect feels knowing that the sender of the message “knows” them and their likes, dislikes and preferences? The fact that the message was simply based on information that the recipient provided will hardly erode the good feeling and high response rate that the email marketer will end up with. This will be in the form of higher click through rates, higher open rates and much higher conversions from prospects to paying customers.
When you personalize the experience in this simple way that is executed all the time in email marketing you create the illusion in the mind of the user that they are deeply cared about. What can people fail to do for folks who care about them? This is why this technique can be pretty expensive in getting customers to pay for higher priced products and services.
Conclusion
You really cannot afford to ignore the all the benefits of email marketing listed above. Nor can you continue to pretend that the sheer power of email marketing does not exist or will not be useful to you. How can you possibly pass up the chance to dramatically increase your sales and profits? Especially when all you need to do is use an email marketing management service specifically designed for SMEs that will make life so much easier for you. Place your order now and revolutionize sales and marketing at your business forever.
See also;
Writer's fascinating email marketing experiment
