10 benefits of email marketing every business should know

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You might have read somewhere that the benefits of email marketing make it one of the easiest and cheapest ways to grow your business.

Here’s the truth: email marketing is very cost-effective, has a high ROI potential, and is easy to crack on the workflow side with Omnisend templates.

The importance of email marketing cannot be overstated if you want to build a strong, lasting relationship with your customers and drive business growth. 

Serious marketers find email is a slam dunk, and there’s plenty more meat on its bones with benefits that can build long-term value for your business.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is the sending of targeted and personalized emails to people who have opted into marketing communications. 

It can be anything from announcing a new product line or sale, to setting up intricate automations that are triggered by a specific event or customer behavior, such as welcome email flows and abandoned cart automation.

Personalization and automation are crucial for email marketing success. To enable personalization, you can divide your email list into smaller groups based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and customer lifecycle stages.

Automation can send messages at the right time, such as a welcome newsletter within minutes of signing up, reminders for abandoned cart items, and order confirmation and shipping notification emails.

10 key benefits of email marketing

Now you have a taste for email marketing and what it requires for success, let’s get down to brass tacks: email marketing benefits. 

Cost-effectiveness

Cost-effectiveness is one of the most significant advantages of email marketing.

It doesn’t require substantial investments in printing, postage, or media placement like with print, nor does it require an ad spend budget like paid ads. 

You can do email marketing for free (minus your time) with only an email list and an email client. However, most businesses eventually upgrade to paid plans on their chosen platform as their needs grow, to access helpful features and send sufficient email volumes. 

We have a price comparison calculator for comparing email marketing platform prices based on the number of contacts in your list. You can compare Mailchimp, Drip, GetResponse, and other leading providers alongside Omnisend and see which one would be the best fit for you.

High ROI

ROI is how much money you get back for every $1 spent, so you can identify which channels are generating revenue and which are not. 

Email marketing has an average ROI of $36, meaning it generated $36 for every dollar invested in it. Omnisend’s US merchants saw double this, with a whopping $73.20 ROI. 

To calculate your own ROI and see if you’re getting close to the averages, you can use our email ROI calculator.

Increased sales

Sales increases are one of the most significant email marketing benefits. 

Emails that prompt immediate purchases by following up on abandoned carts, retargeting shopping sessions, and promoting flash sales can increase direct sales for ecommerce and digital service providers. 

Automating some of these emails is the way to go. You set it up once and it runs on autopilot, generating conversions you might have missed otherwise. For example, in 2023, automated emails generated 41% of all email orders while accounting for only 2% of emails sent.

Equestrian apparel retailer Kerrits uses Omnisend to automate seasonal email campaigns with product abandonment emails — although these messages account for only 4% of all sends, 23% of their email sales come from them and they have revenue-per-email of $6.50. 

The takeaway? Targeted, personalized emails win BIG.  

Email also works great alongside other channels. How great? Last year, brands generated an additional $47 million in orders by using SMS and push notifications. 

Scalability

With the right provider, email marketing lets you expand your reach and communicate with more subscribers without encountering significant bottlenecks or cost increases. 

Scaling while keeping costs down can be one of the biggest challenges because some email marketing platforms have steep cost increases as you send more. That’s why it’s worth carefully considering the options before choosing your platform, otherwise you may need to migrate in the future.

To get started, Omnisend’s pricing calculator lets you easily compare providers and narrow down the ones that provide the most suitable plans for your business. 

For seamless scalability, consider time-saving features like pre-made automations and email templates, as well as performance-testing features like A/B testing.

For example, you might automate re-engagement emails for passive subscribers who haven’t interacted with your brand for a while, send out automated birthday emails with a special discount, or send abandoned cart offers — and that’s nowhere near half of it. 

Omnisend also sends text messages globally, so you can collect phone numbers in your signup forms and effortlessly incorporate SMS marketing in the same workflows as your emails. 

Personalization and segmentation

Personalization is the key to creating email campaigns that resonate with your audience, and segmentation is the means to achieve it. 

Segmenting your email list based on subscriber data, browse and purchase history, demographics, and interests (among other criteria) will help you deliver content that is truly relevant to your audience. 

This targeted approach cuts through the noise and ensures your emails build stronger relationships with your audience.

Whether you send out product recommendations, exclusive deals, brand stories, or surveys, your emails are more likely to achieve your business goals when they feel like a one-on-one conversation rather than a mass marketing blast. 

A few segmentation basics:

• Group subscribers by signup source, purchase behavior, customer lifecycle stage, and average email engagement 
• Use an email marketing platform to create segments and nurture each group with relevant content

Measurable results

Email marketing platforms offer detailed analytics you can use to track the performance of your campaigns and make data-driven decisions.

The important ones:

• Conversion rate
• Open rate
• Email ROI
• Click-through rate
• Bounce rate
• Spam rate 
• Unsubscribe rate 

Your conversion rate is the most important metric for measuring the effectiveness of your email campaigns in driving sales. Meanwhile, ROI is the one to look at when reviewing the profitability of your email marketing campaigns. 

Ecommerce-focused email marketing platforms like Omnisend integrate with many popular ecommerce platforms, like Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Wix (among others) to show how much revenue your campaigns generated. 

Building relationships 

Staying in touch with your subscribers keeps your brand top-of-mind and reinforces the relationship for customer retention. Plus, you can guide them through your customer journey, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. 

Some scenarios call for timely emails — order confirmations, shipping updates, prompt responses to inquiries — while existing customers usually find loyalty rewards a welcome surprise. 

The point of all this is to build relationships, and whether that’s from transactional or loyalty emails, it doesn’t matter so long as you’re sincere.

While promoting your products or services is okay, you can also build relationships by offering genuine value to your subscribers with brand stories, information around your process and ethics, and helpful tips that align with your subscribers’ interests.

Integrations

Email marketing isn’t a closed loop — it can integrate with your website, social ads, ecommerce stocking system, and much more. This is particularly beneficial with omnichannel marketing, as it allows seamless communication and data synchronization across various channels and platforms.

A few Omnisend app integrations webmasters find helpful:

• Zapier for importing contacts
• Restock Alerts for email notifications
• Buy with Prime for real-time order notifications
• Gatsby for influencer marketing 
• Ninja Forms and Gravity Forms WordPress integration.
• Facebook Lead Ads for syncing contact segments – but one example of our robust social media integrations.

Omnisend has over 130 app integrations (and counting) to ensure your email marketing campaigns fit your other marketing efforts like a glove. And all of these integrations are available on our free plan.

Enhanced customer engagement 

Regular and strategically planned communication is the key to increasing customer engagement, fostering loyalty, and driving sales.

With helpful content and sound timing, you can develop a winning customer engagement marketing strategy — think birthday emails, product updates, discounts, and loyalty program updates that keep your subscribers engaged. 

We can drill this down to a process:

• Provide a fantastic first customer experience with welcome emails 
• Deliver initial value with exclusive discounts 
• Reward loyalty with bonuses and special offers 
• Enhance brand experiences with invitations to events and freebies 

Boosting traffic to your website

Driving traffic to your website through email is as simple as including a CTA button in the message, and it’s all trackable with Google Analytics. 

You might send subscribers to a product page, exclusive offer, or blog post — the point is that you can generate traffic and do it very well.

The secret ingredient is an attention-grabbing subject line and an email body that gets to the point with prominent, action-oriented CTA buttons. Bland won’t cut it when subscribers have better content in their inbox. 

How to get started with email marketing

It’s extremely easy to get started with email marketing. Choose the right software, use tools like signup forms to build your email list and automation to make sales while you sleep, and the platform can track performance for you. 

See how simple it is in under 13 minutes with the video below:

Choose the right email marketing platform

The best email marketing platforms make it easy to create beautiful emails with pre-built templates and a drag-and-drop editor. 

But that isn’t a comprehensive email marketing solution — the most successful marketers have a platform that also handles subscriber data and segmentation for maximum results, with integrations for the apps they use to build their list of subscribers.

Your email platform should also scale without ballooning costs, and you shouldn’t have to pay for extensions to perform basic tasks. 

Omnisend fits the bill, with 130+ app integrations, templates, drag-and-drop editing, campaign reports to see and refine what’s working, and over 5,000 5-star reviews on Shopify.

Establish clear goals 

You need clear goals to know if your campaigns have been successful. For example, you might want to increase click-through rates from emails to your website by 20% in the next month, or recover 10% of abandoned carts, or generate 1,000 unique website visits from the monthly newsletter over the next year. 

These clear goals will help to guide you in your design choices when crafting emails, choosing your audience segments to engage, as well as the content within the email. And, of course, you’ll know exactly what metrics to track.

In other words, goals inspire relevance. 

Build a subscriber list

To comply with GDPR, your subscribers need to opt-in — meaning you can only send emails to people who have agreed to receive them. 

So, how do you build a subscriber list?

• Signup forms on your website are perfect for building email subscribers with affirmative consent (opt-in to marketing)
• Gamified forms like the Wheel of Fortune can enhance signup conversion rates by offering prizes 
• Promote your newsletter and offers on social media, with exclusive incentives not available anywhere else 

Success example: Organic Aromas invested just one hour in a four-week experiment with Omnisend’s email capture features, resulting in a 150% increase in newsletter signups. 

Craft your first email 

Your first email to new newsletter subscribers is usually a welcome email thanking them for signing up, but it might also be transactional if there’s clear buying intent — for example, an abandoned cart or a saved shopping list. 

In any case, the formula is simple:

• Set a friendly tone 
• Introduce your brand
• Offer a clear incentive
• Include a prominent CTA 
• Provide important info 
• Incorporate social proof 
• Personalize the content 

After your first email, you might:

• Populate your emails with products directly from your store, eliminating the need for manual image and detail uploads
• Boost your sales with intelligent, dynamic product suggestions that encourage customers to explore your offerings more
• Streamline your email creation process by designing and saving custom templates for every scenario — from exclusive discounts to exciting product launches

Wrap up 

Email marketing is cost-effective, efficient, and perfect for increasing sales with its high ROI. 

Plus, the benefits of email marketing for small businesses are scalable, supporting growth and other marketing channels to boost returns.  

The statistics don’t lie: marketers are getting higher returns from email marketing, and it’s easy to get started.