13 Benefits of Email Marketing For Small Businesses (2024)

In 2023, when you have social media for marketing purposes, you might wonder why anyone would ever use email marketing as a marketing platform.

Let me tell you that social media marketing ain't got nothing on email marketing. The average email marketing ROI is $51.52 for every $1.35 spent. Meanwhile, social media marketing ROI is tricky as results vary for each business, and it's more of a hit or miss.

Okay, no more shade on social media; it's actually a good marketing platform. But it's best not to put all your eggs in one basket and use several marketing channels.

This guide will elaborate on some of the email marketing benefits to sway you to try email marketing as one of your marketing channels.

Table of contents

• 13 email marketing benefits for businesses

  • 1. Email marketing is easy to set up and start
  • 2. Cost-effective marketing channel
  • 3. Gives a high return on investment (ROI)
  • 4. You can see the impact of the campaign
  • 5. Can collect first-party data
  • 6. Can create hyper-personalized campaigns
  • 7. You have control over who sees the campaign
  • 8. Build better and lasting customer relationships
  • 9. Helps generate traffic to your website
  • 10. Can be used to nurture leads
  • 11. Establish your brand reputation and build credibility
  • 12. Boost sales with different email campaigns
  • 13. Saves time with email automation

• Get started with email marketing

13 email marketing benefits for businesses

Here are some of the email marketing benefits that'll help illuminate why email marketing for small business is a good channel to generate, nurture and convert leads into customers.

1. Email marketing is easy to set up and start

Unlike other forms of marketing, email marketing doesn't need much time or technical knowledge to start. And, you don't need months to prepare or plan the campaign. Instead, you can create, design, and send campaigns to everyone on your email list in a few weeks with email marketing.

You can start by sending simple plain text emails or using ready-to-use templates to create a more sophisticated HTML or AMP email. Special or complex campaigns might require more prep time, but you can generally get them done in a short duration.

2. Cost-effective marketing channel

With traditional or digital marketing, you must pay a lot to ensure your target audience sees your campaign. But, with email marketing, you can send your email marketing campaigns to thousands of people for a much cheaper price.

And if you are a small business with only a small list of subscribers, you can even start email marketing with a basic or free plan from different email service providers (ESPs).

Also, creating an email campaign is more cost-effective as you don't have to invest in photoshoots, location fees, printers, mailing, etc. You only need a person to create the email copy and images for the email campaign.

3. Gives a high return on investment (ROI)

A good marketing ROI is 5:1, and we saw earlier that email marketing could give an ROI of $51.52 for every $1 invested. It works so well in getting conversions because you can send targeted emails to your audience at the right time when they are online.

However, more people are using emails these days, so when combined with the low platform cost, your campaigns will have a higher conversion rate and return on investment.

4. You can see the impact of the campaign

With most digital or traditional marketing campaigns, the aim is to create a general awareness around your brand/product and hope that it'll lead to sales later. It could be weeks after the marketing campaign launch, and you cannot determine if the sale was due to the campaign or some other reason.

That's not the case with email marketing, as you can track how much sales came from the campaign without waiting for weeks or months to see the results. The best part with email marketing is that you can track conversions and how many sales came through, which you can't do accurately with other channels.

When you know which campaign is successful, you can better understand what type works best for you and what doesn't. And, you can make changes to elements of your campaign like subject line, images, call to action, and A/B test to see which does better.

5. Can collect first-party data

First-party data is any information about your customers you collect and own. And businesses usually get information about their subscriber's preferences and interests using surveys and forms.

If you have conducted surveys before, you know how hard it can be to get your customers to fill out the survey. But, if you use email marketing, conducting surveys is easy as you can send every one of your customers the survey directly to their inbox.

And people who check their emails are more likely to open your survey and fill it out. So, you can get more information from your customers and take in their feedback to improve your product and strategy.

You can take it one step further by using AMP to create surveys that can be filled out in the email itself. It'll help you get a higher response rate on your surveys. How? Well, interactive surveys will encourage more people to fill out the form as it removes the obstacle of redirecting people to a different website.

You can see how this works in the example below:

You can use ESPs like Mailmodo, which supports AMP, to create interactive emails and reap its benefits.

You also have access to data on opens, clicks, conversions, unsubscribe, etc., in the dashboard of your ESP. You don't have to depend on second or third-party sources to collect data on your prospects. And using this data, you can create targeted emails based on their interests.

6. Can create hyper-personalized campaigns

With email marketing, you can develop personalized emails for different audience segments.

And you can also send emails to your audience based on their position in the marketing funnel and personalize it based on their browser activity or purchases. For example, you can send one email campaign to repeat customers and another different one to new customers.

You can use dynamic content to alter your campaign to suit its recipient. With dynamic content, you don't have to waste time creating different campaigns for different audiences; rather, the content in the campaign changes.

"We've all heard the legend of its impressive ROI, but that's not the only reason email is touted as a powerful marketing channel. Something that I've always appreciated and admired about marketing emails is the ability to add dynamic content. Customers like it when emails are customized for them. No one else is getting the email that shows everything they just browsed. That's just for them. As a marketer, being able to include dynamic content in emails gives teams the ability to create content that connects with each customer on an individual level. And dynamic content goes beyond just pulling in products. Using customer data like zip code, time zone, etc., brands can create hyper-personalized emails without manual effort. Voila!"
- Brooke Grief, Iterable

At Mailmodo, we helped Indian Express, a popular media house, to set up a dynamic RSS feed inside the email. Result? The email content is up to date, relevant to the audience, and engaging.

You can read more about the case study here.

7. You have control over who sees the campaign

Since you are the owner of your email list, you have complete control over who sees your email and who doesn't. You can specify who you want to send your campaign to and when. All your emails get delivered to your subscribers unless your email is considered spam or has illegal content.

On social media or other channels, you can only enter the characteristics of your target audience and hope the campaign gets shown to people.

And, with organic social media marketing, the reach is even worse as you are at the mercy of the platform and depend on them to get your message seen.

8. Build better and lasting customer relationships

The main selling point for email marketing is that you can directly communicate with your audience to establish relationships with existing and future customers. They can reply to your emails which is not common with other marketing channels.

This is beneficial since it allows users another way to reach you if they have issues or concerns about your company. Rather than trying to find you on social media, people can search for your brand's name in their inboxes. Then they can open your most recent email and click "Reply."

You encourage users to contact you with questions by keeping this line of communication open. This will help you maintain the relationship, improve revenue, and lower your churn rate.

"I love that email is such a great relationship builder – there's no marketing channel that better allows to you create hyper-custom, timely experiences at scale while being respectful of the recipient's time and interest.

You can personalize your messages to every person on your list, populate their email with things that are relevant to them, and still be a responsive, good listener if they choose to respond. Email is such a great way to build a trusting, long-lasting relationship between your brand and your audience!"
- Natalie Jackson, CBIZ

9. Helps generate traffic to your website

Using email marketing, you can promote pages on your website like blogs or landing pages through a CTA in the email and direct people to the site. When you direct people to your website, it'll increase the number of visitors to your site and help improve your SEO and boost your content ranking.

In the example below, Heyday has put together an email introducing their article on acne and breakout and gives value to their readers by telling them how they can prevent it.

Source: Reallygoodemails

10. Can be used to nurture leads

Getting new leads can be challenging, so it's up to you to do what you can do to nurture them and turn them into paying customers.

• You can send personalized emails to nurture them and move them further down the marketing funnel.

• You may set up a series of lead nurturing emails based on user activity.

• Then, as soon as a new subscriber joins, they receive these emails.

For example, when a person signs up for your email list and downloads your ebook from your website, they will start getting drip emails to give them valuable information and motivate them to buy your product/service.

Here is an example of a lead nurture email from Flodesk:

11. Establish your brand reputation and build credibility

One of your ambitions as a business owner may be to be recognized as an expert in your field. When you send out a newsletter on your sector, you establish yourself as a thought leader and expert. You can send emails with relevant, helpful information, and your readers will believe you know what you're talking about.

In the example below, Shopify sends an email inviting a webinar useful for small business owners. They send out emails with information that is helpful for new e-commerce business owners to help them grow their business. This helps Shopify establish authority on being an expert in the e-commerce field.

Source: Reallygoodemails

12. Boost sales with different email campaigns

You can send various types of campaigns, teasing an upcoming product launch, showing the BTS of upcoming projects, etc.

It will make your subscribers excited for what is about to come. This way, when the launch does come, you'll get many people raving about it as this is what they have been waiting for.

It helps aid the success of your launch or update and boost sales. You can use this during the holiday when you have new sales or product launches or in your general promotional email campaigns.

In the example below, look at how Hardgraft builds excitement through email marketing for their wooly cube product launch.

Source: Reallygoodemails

13. Saves time with email automation

Now, you might feel that all these email marketing benefits sound fantastic, but you don't have time to keep sending campaigns yourself to specific people. That's where the final advantage of email marketing comes into play. The entire process of email marketing can be completely automated.

You must create the campaigns once, add your email list, connect with API and check if everything looks good. If it looks good, you can enable the automation feature in your ESP, and you are good to go.

You don't have to send anything manually, as the ESPs will send the campaign according to the API trigger to the people in your email list. This marketing automation system is particularly useful for welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, transactional emails, etc.

Get started with email marketing

Now that you know all the email marketing benefits, you know why email marketing is a great marketing channel, so get started. Select an ESP, upload your email list, create a campaign, and start email marketing. If you want to know how to get started in email marketing, check out our guide on email marketing campaigns.