Is Email Marketing Important For Small Businesses?

YES! Email marketing is so very important even if you’re a tiny company with a small target audience. In fact, it’s even more important the smaller your company is because you need to take advantage of every single potential touch point you have with your customers. By nurturing your audience, you create what’s called a “warm” audience who are not only receptive your emails, but open to your future deals, promotions, new products, and your brand.

Email list vs. no email list

Building an email list is essential to any small business. In my opinion, it’s how you get new clients to trust you, old clients to buy what you’re selling again, it’s easier to upsell, cross-sell, and share new products and promotions. Basically, you make more money when you have an email list.

Let’s say you didn’t have an email list. That means your website traffic is coming solely from:

1. Google searches
2. Paid ads
3. Social media posts
4. Networking

While this may be enough for some companies, for the bulk of small business owners, this is nowhere near enough to make a living. Plus, we all know how difficult it is to manage all of the above all by yourself AND still keep your business running without a hitch.

Now let’s say you actively collect emails and send out non-salesy emails out to your audience every so often.

The result is you’ll have a group of people who trust you, believe you’re an expert at your craft, and think of you when they or a friend need your services or products.

These are people who willingly gave you their email because they were interested in you. They TRUSTED you enough to give out their private email so follow through with high-value emails that they’ll find valuable.

They’re interested in your business and your offer so take advantage of it. You have a direct line of communication so use it to build and increase that trust.

When it comes time for them to invest and give you money, their wallet will be that much closer to you because of that trust you’ve built with them.

How would a small business benefit from an email list?

Many small businesses are all about connections. It’s about who you know, who your audience knows, and how they think of you.

Take the babysitter example: If you mention to a friend that you need a babysitter, they’ll suggest their babysitter and most likely you’ll end up giving them a call and hiring them for your next Saturday night date.

It’s the same for small businesses.

If you mention to a friend that you’re considering to hire a personal trainer to help you lose weight, chances are you’ll visit their website and lean toward choosing them because your friend has vouched for them.

Sales circulate around trust and friendly, high-value emails allow that transaction to happen smoothly.

Does building an email list take time?

Not all the time, but for certain companies, yes. It depends on your industry and how well written your messaging is and the design of your sales funnel. But more important is to ask yourself:

Is my email list highly engaging? Are my open rates/click rates high? Are my emails interesting to my audience? You can find all of this information in the analytics section of your email marketing platform.

Don’t focus on the number of people in your email list. Focus on high engagement. High engagement means you’re building trust, have high open/click rates, and can expect more sales down the road. If you have a lot of people in your email list and no engagement, then it doesn’t matter how many emails you’ve collected.

Some of the most successful small businesses have small email lists but a very specific target audience where their messaging “clicks” with their audience every single time.