Email marketing can be a valuable tool to add to your content marketing arsenal. Communicating directly with customers can build brand loyalty and convince on-the-fence followers to purchase your products or services.

However, email marketing won’t work for every business. As with any form of marketing, it takes work to get right and doesn’t guarantee immediate results. So, how do you know if you should invest in email marketing?

What is Email Marketing?

Put simply, email marketing is about using email to reach customers and advertise your business.

It might sound old-fashioned in this age of social media advertising and Google algorithms, but there are over 4 billion daily email users globally. As such, email marketing is a valuable way of directly communicating with a vast number of prospective buyers at once. 

By sending regular emails to customers, you can build loyalty and provide your customers with additional information relating to your products or services. Emails can encourage customers to visit your website, make a purchase, or tell others about your brand. 

Today, 81% of small businesses say email marketing is their primary customer acquisition channel. To help you decide if it’s worth it for your business, let’s outline the main advantages and disadvantages of email marketing. 

Email Marketing: Advantages

One of the most significant advantages of investing in email marketing is that it can be a cost-effective way to advertise to customers who are genuinely interested in your business. Subscribers must give permission to be on your mailing list, resulting in a group of customers who are already thinking of purchasing and are easy to access.

Consequently, email marketing can result in effortless conversions; in one survey, 59% of respondents said that emails had influenced their purchasing decision. 

Email marketing can also be time effective. With the help of email software, you can automatically set weekly emails to send at a specific time or, to encourage conversion, trigger an email when a customer has completed an action on your website. 

Email Marketing: Disadvantages

However, email marketing does require some technical knowledge to get right. For example, to ensure your emails reach the right audiences, you should prioritise A/B testing: comparing two different versions of an email, for example, with different images or subject lines.

You’ll also need to be skilled in copywriting and design to get the most out of your emails. While it’s possible to hire an email professional to do your email marketing for you, for some small businesses, this may be too much of an investment. 

Poorly designed emails will do more than reduce your open rate. If your customers see them as spam emails, the reputation of your business will be at stake. 

Our Advice

As with many aspects of small business marketing, email marketing isn’t worth doing unless you can do it right. 

If you are successful, it’s a valuable way of building relationships with your customers and boosting conversion rates–which can be invaluable for a small business.