I am going to make an important statement. If you’re not doing regular email marketing, listen up. Email Marketing is the single most valuable thing you can start doing for your business today.

Why Email Marketing

Email marketing has been a popular channel for advertising for a long time. Why? Because it works.

If you’re already sending promotional and educational information by email then you’re already doing email marketing. Email marketing is the process of building promotional and informational emails. Businesses send these emails to a list of subscribers who have opted to receive them.

Your competition is doing it

Guess what? Your competitors have already figured out how effective email is and they are doing it well. As of 2018, a full 80% of retailers identify email marketing as the greatest channel for retaining customers.

Reach Millennials

Trying to reach millennial customers? Think social media is the way to do it? Think again. Consider that 73% of millennials said email is their preferred way of receiving information from businesses.

Its the marketing format your customers prefer

You may be investing in other forms of direct advertising. These may include mailers, texts, cold calls and social media outreach. All are great means of communication and have their role. But, 77% of consumers prefer to receive permission based promotional messages via email.

What is the big difference with email? It is the acceptable form of interruption marketing. When you buy a radio ad or send a mailer or run a tv commercial you are interrupting your customer’s activity with a promotional message. That is interruption advertising. When you send an email, you are interrupting a customer too. Yet, there is one huge difference.

The person you are interrupting by email gave you permission to interrupt them. This is the way they prefer you interrupt them with promotional information. Furthermore, they like receiving promotions this way from your business!

Your customers want emails from you!

In fact, 28% of consumers say that they would like to receive more than one promotional email blast per week from the companies they subscribe to!

That’s a powerful medium. It is right at your fingertips as a small business owner.

How to do Email Marketing in 2020

How do you do it? It is not that hard anymore. There are companies known as email service providers. People refer to these companies as ESPs, for short. Email service providers offer a platform where you can build and send email blasts to your customers.

The most popular email service providers for small businesses are MailChimp and Constant Contact.

Don’t let Amazon win

Here’s the bad news. Amazon is excellent at email marketing. They learned long ago that email had the power to drive sales in a major way. Their execution is brilliant.

Amazon tracks everything customers do on their website. Then, Amazon runs targeted email campaigns. The emails customers receive are about the product category they looked at on Amazon. Amazon tailors their emails to the exact desires of the individual consumer. It’s all based on exactly what the customer looked at on the site.

Wow!

To be clear, let’s use a specific example. Let’s say you sell quilts. Your customer may look at quilts on Amazon. If they do, they will begin receiving emails encouraging them to buy quilts from Amazon.

Yikes!

The good news is that you can compete. Marketing messages are effective. Your business needs to be in your customer’s inbox too.

Let’s build your email marketing game plan. Keep reading my blog for more information about how to do email marketing effectively.