Guest post by:
Tanel Rand,
Smaily.com.
Businesses can use many digital channels for marketing purposes, such as social media, SEO, email marketing, etc. Naturally, small businesses have smaller budgets and/or resources available for marketing. More often than not, a choice has to be made where marketing efforts can go. So today, let’s take a look at email marketing: do small businesses need email marketing?
Low budget marketing does not mean ineffective marketing. So, where does email marketing stand in terms of budgeting? Yes, there are email marketing tools that are expensive. But the truth is that email marketing can actually cost very little. There are tools out there that are just right for small businesses and have great if not better functionality than the big brand names. For example, Smaily is a European Email Service Provider offering a free plan and affordable upgrade options that are perfect for small businesses.
If you compare email marketing to more traditional offline marketing, email marketing will bring tremendous value for the money invested. For example, creating flyers can cost much more: add the design, printing and mailing costs, and you’ve got a sizeable sum on your hands. So, yes, cost-wise, email marketing is definitely a good fit for small businesses.
It can be challenging for small businesses to find the time they can spare for marketing. Employees are wearing many hats to drive their business forward. And many companies are actually one-person businesses, definitely feeling the time pressure! Digital marketing agencies can help build and deploy newsletters; however, even one-person businesses can send out professional marketing emails!
It might seem complicated initially, but there are so many great solutions to help out. You don’t need to know how to code in HTML and understand CSS to craft a marketing email. There are email template libraries and very user-friendly drag-and-drop editors for that. So the actual build of the email doesn’t really take long as you don’t need to create anything from scratch.
Email Service Providers also offer email automation functionality. With an initial time investment to set up the automated rules and content, you can have unique, targeted and personalized customer journeys where automation will do the job for you. From a time perspective, email marketing is a definite yes for small businesses!
Email marketing can be a great help in driving results for the business. Let’s take cart abandonment as an example. Let’s say the average cart abandonment rate is 69%. So that’s nearly 70% of potential sales lost. But are they, really?
To minimize cart abandonment, even the smallest businesses can set up abandoned cart emails. These emails help give that extra push for the shoppers to complete their checkouts. According to SaleCycle data, you can get more than 2% of email recipients converted through the abandoned cart emails. So that’s additional closed sales just by implementing an automated email marketing flow.
Therefore, email marketing is great for small businesses: it will help boost sales and get more desired conversions.
For businesses of any size, email marketing can help develop strong relationships with the customer base. Even if you just send out a monthly newsletter, it benefits your brand. Emails make you visible in the recipients’ inboxes. They help onboard new customers and retain existing ones. Setting up email campaigns (especially automated ones) is much more time and cost-efficient than reaching out to the customers individually.
Allowing people to sign up and start receiving email communications will give you a warm list of leads to work with – it’s much better than cold prospecting. Marketing emails can be very personalized and targeted. With automation and personalization, email messages can look like personal one-to-one emails if needed. Therefore, email marketing is a great communication tool to reach out to your subscribers, and it’s perfect for small businesses.
Statista data shows that most small businesses planned to use social media as their marketing tactic in 2019. And digital advertising and email marketing were preferred by 23% of respondents.
However, small businesses can use multiple marketing tactics and several digital channels even with time and resource constraints. For example, if you want to grow your social media presence, email marketing can help you with that. Add a social media bar in your email template; introduce your email subscribers to your social media channels through your marketing emails, and vice versa.
Email marketing can integrate well with other marketing tactics and help build an omnichannel marketing strategy, even for the smallest businesses.
While there are many other benefits that email marketing can bring to small businesses, we want to highlight tax deductions. Depending on your country, the money you invest in email marketing could potentially be used for a tax write-off!
In many countries, advertising and marketing are often legitimate tax deductibles. Therefore, these expenses could be claimed back through tax returns. And that can be a great help for small businesses. So, reach out to your accountant or tax consultant and see what can be used as a deductible expense. For example, it could be the cost of advertising, or the money spent on marketing tools (such as your Email Service Provider).
Email Marketing is a Great Fit for Small Businesses
Email marketing is an excellent addition to any marketing strategy. Understandably, small businesses have more constraints regarding budgets and time or human resources available than bigger enterprises.
And, sometimes, they have to make tough decisions on where to spend their business efforts. That said, email marketing is an excellent investment for even the smallest businesses. It’s a perfect way to be in touch with the customer base. With available automation, one can eliminate manual work and cut the time required to get marketing campaigns ready. Email marketing is very affordable and can bring a great return on investment. Therefore, it’s definitely a good fit for small businesses!