Best 3 Benefits Of Email Marketing To Your Business

November 5, 2018

Last Updated on March 31, 2021 by Nadim Alamuddin

As a new entrepreneur or blogger, you may have heard the term “email marketing”, but may need further instruction. Email marketing is the process by which you send automated emails or newsletters to your customers and/or prospects. This post will highlight 3 best benefits of email marketing. I will also give a recommendation for a tool I use in email marketing, to help you nurture your customers.

In last week’s post, “Stop Leaving Money On The Table: Here’s How“, we learned that, in order to capture a prospect’s name and email address, we needed to have an Opt-In form. We also learned that the Opt-In form is integrated with a tool known as “Autoresponder.” It is that very tool, the autoresponder, that is responsible to send emails and newsletter to your prospects and/or clients, also known as “your list.”

Before going into details about autoresponders and their functionality, let’s answer the main headline of this post:

So, what are the key benefits of email marketing to your business?

There are many benefits of email marketing. I will touch on my top three benefits, based on my opinion and experience.

Benefit #1: Keep Contact With Your List

When your prospects, readers and customers opted in to your subscription, they expected something in return, whether an e-book download, a newsletter or a periodic e-mail with your news. Whatever the reason, it is your objective to send them a periodic e-mail / newsletter with what they expect (or what you promised on your opt-in form). By consistently sending this communication, you are fulfilling your end of the bargain. You’re also nurturing your list by keeping them updated on your activities.

If you’re a small business owner, emailing your list regularly ensures you keep your brand in their mind. With these frequent mails, you can keep them updated on any promotions, specials, or events you may have. You may even send them some valuable insights, free courses, or any other type of value. Bottom line: email delivers your message.

If you’re a blogger or a small business owner with a blog, you may argue that you can reach your audience with your blog. True, however, email marketing is more focused to your list, it’s more personal, and, you’re able to send targeted content. To a blogger, email marketing ensures your list comes back to your blog (your brand).

Benefit #2: Use Emails To Deliver Your Message

How would you promote your online products, your newly published blog post or your upcoming store sale? Did you know that, if you promote your products or blog post on social media, say Facebook, only 2% of people actually see your post in their feed, according to this article? According to Google, however, email reaches its target 80% of the time.

Based on the above statistics, which method would you rather use?

Benefit #3: Use Emails For Calls-To-Action (CTA)

Before explaining this benefit, let’s define a call-to-action. This is usually in the form of a link where you instruct the reader to do some action: i.e. you are “calling” them to perform an “action.” For example, “please fill in your name and best email address in the form below, and click on Submit.”

When you send emails or newsletters to your list, you must always include one or two calls-to-action to get your prospect to click on a link that performs a certain action. For example, you may be promoting a new product and if clicked, the link takes the reader to Amazon.com. As a blogger, you may have links back to your blog to ensure your reader comes back to your blog.

Did you know that email readers are apt to click more links in email than from tweets? The term used to measure this is called “Click Through Rate (CTR)” as people click through to the link provided. According to this article, the average CTR for email is between 3 and 8%, depending on the industry. However, this article puts the CTR for Twitter between 1-3% and Facebook at 0.1%! So, email is still a better way to reach your audience for your calls to action. Bottom line: Email marketing drives through more conversions (more clicks).

There you have them: my best 3 benefits of email marketing for your business.

Affiliate Disclosure

This blog post contains links that take you to external sites, featuring products that I recommend, based on my experience with them. If you decide to purchase from them, I may earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you. For more info, check out the Affiliate Disclosure.

How To Send Automated Mails To Your List

Now that you’ve learned how to capture names & emails from your readers and/or prospects, it’s time to dive into what autoresponders do. Most autoresponders on the market have similar functionality, with the choice being ease of use, price and additional (useful) features.

Here are some popular features:

Contact List

This is the basic functionality of autoresponders, to be able to store your contact list. Here, you have the ability to add more fields to those captured from your opt-in forms, if you later are able to obtain that information. You are also able to “segment” your list, by categorizing prospects from loyal readers or actual buyers. By doing so, you can send different emails to different segments.

Autoresponder

This is the email marketing feature. You can effectively build a series of emails to nurture and build trust with your list. Here, you can design an email message to go out whenever you wish. You have flexibility to send many messages daily, at defined times, or just one message a week. It’s your decision. You have full flexibility in building the emails and personalizing them to your list or segment.

For example, if your list is whoever subscribed to your blog, your emails may be updates to let them know you have published new posts. They can also have links to some free products or e-books, or some courses for them to follow. On the other hand, suppose you have collected a list of prospects who landed on your squeeze page, opted in, but did not purchase anything. These could be mailed follow up messages to complete their purchase and later on to provide them links to other products they may enjoy.

The Autoresponder feature is the main functionality of these email marketing tools. Its ease of use and flexibility is usually what makes you decide on a particular tool.

Automation

Some tools provide some form of automation or workflow. Depending on a certain trigger, an action is set in motion. For example, let’s say a prospect becomes a buyer, you can define the system to automatically move that person to the list of buyers, so that he/she starts to receive other more targeted mails. When you first start out, you may have just a few contacts in your lists and this may be something you can do manually. But, as your list grows, automation becomes a great functionality to make use of.

My No. 1 Tool for an Autoresponder: GetResponse (GR)

I have been a user of GetResponse for over 5 years. I was introduced to it when I had started in network marketing, as it was so easy to use and integrated very well with the sales platform I was using.

Here are some of the features that GetResponse offers:

GetResponse Key Features

Contact List Segmentation

You can create many lists in GR and segment them any which way you want. In addition, you can email your campaigns (your emails and/or newsletters) to one or more lists. This feature is not available in some other tools on the market.

Autoresponder Pre-loaded Messages

This is a great feature. If you happen to have a list of email messages from another provider, you can “migrate” them to GR using this feature. Normally, writing & personalizing emails for your lists is a very time consuming activity that must be done to achieve results. Migrating emails makes it so much more manageable.

Autoresponder Mails & Newsletters

You’re able to design emails and newsletters to go out at your preset intervals. You’re also able to schedule them to be sent when your recipients are most likely receptive to open them! The emails you send out can be personalized and can be written in HTML or in visual “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) format. You have a feature that lets you preview how your email will look like on many platforms or browsers.

RSS-to-Email

By connecting your blog’s feed, this feature will be triggered whenever you publish a new post. You can then schedule emails or newsletters to go out instantly upon a new post being published, or weekly or monthly, with custom parameters on how many posts you want to include and what your newsletter’s title should be. I am using this feature to send a weekly newsletter to my subscribers, which has a link to the 2 posts that I have published in the past week. This is a way to keep your readers coming back to your blog.

Forms

GetResponse has over 500 built-in templates for opt-in forms, split into 9 categories. There is a nifty color picker, which helps you keep consistent with your blog’s theme colors when designing the forms. You can do A/B testing to maximize your conversions and monitor them using the built-in analytics feature. You can integrate these forms on any website or tool available.

Surveys

Instead of using “Survey Monkey” or other survey software, you can do surveys within GR and send directly to your list. You can customize your survey as you need and put in opt-in fields as well. It can be completely integrated with other tools or websites. And, of course, you can monitor how well your surveys have done by checking their analytics.

Basic Automation

GetResponse provides you ways to guide your prospects into intricate scenarios. In the basic option, GR provides workflows for you to configure which conditions are your triggering criteria and what actions need to be taken. For example, if a prospect becomes a buyer, which list should he/she now belong to? Automation with GR can get quite sophisticated but need you to upgrade to take advantage of this advanced feature.

More Info On GetResponse

The above features are all included in the basic package, which starts at $15/month for up to 1000 subscribers. You can upgrade to the Pro or Max packages, which will provide you advanced automation, landing pages, webinars and CRM (Customer Relationship Management, a way to store customer information and use for lead generation, sales follow up, etc.)

While GetResponse offers the same features as some of the newer tools on the market, it gets the job done. There are newer and fancier tools, like ConvertKit, that have beautiful interfaces and are full of features.

What Other Tools Are Available?

In my opinion, however, especially as you’re starting out, you need to concentrate on your blogging first. All of the tools I am talking about here will support your blog’s growth. However, do not invest in the bells and whistles right now. Get the basic functionality to help you grow your blog and excel at doing just that. There will be more time later to add extra functionality. If you go with the feature-rich products, you may get overwhelmed with how to use them properly, you may not even have a use for them right now. And, the result? You will have lost the focus you need to spend on your blog.

Here are other worthy tools in Email Marketing:

Aweber

Another popular email marketing tool, Aweber has integration with a rich list of tools and platforms. Aweber has common functionality with GetResponse, except for the more advanced premium functions, like CRM, Webinars and advanced automation. Aweber’s pricing is also a bit more expensive than GetResponse.

MailChimp

Another great email marketing tool, MailChimp has a FREE “starting up” subscription that gives you a no-frills basic tool set for up to 2000 subscribers! Not a bad deal, if you’re just starting out and just building your list. But, as your list grows, you’ll find that GetResponse will have a more cost effective plan, let alone all the added functionality. MailChimp, for example, does not have CRM or webinars, even at the premium level. If you want a more in-depth look at a comparison between MailChimp and GetResponse, this article is very well written and researched.

ConvertKit

This email marketing tool is very simple to use and is the preferred tool for beginning bloggers. If compared side by side with GetResponse, you will find that GR has a lot more features and automation, as well as it’s a more cost effective solution. If your requirements do not go beyond email marketing, then ConvertKit may be the best tool for you, due to its simple to use interface and its versatility and integration with blogging platforms.

Now It’s Your Turn To Decide And Implement Your Email Marketing Strategy

Now that you’re more enlightened with email marketing and its available tools, it’s time to choose a tool, such as GetResponse and sign up for it. Once this is done, my recommendation is to go through the tutorials on the site that walk you through the simple setup you need to integrate it with your Opt-In forms and/or landing pages.

If you’ve heeded my recommendations in last week’s post and this one, you would be working with OptinMonster integrated with GetResponse, just like my own setup. If this is the case, you won’t regret it. Enjoy it to the max!

Thanks once again for reading this post. Please leave me a comment in the “leave a reply” area at the bottom of the post. If you haven’t already, read my posts on how to start a blog and post, in the order below:

If, on the other hand, you prefer mindset posts, here are some that may be of interest:

Best 3 Benefits Of Email Marketing To Your Business

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