Small Business: The Return on Investment for Email Will Surprise You

For small businesses looking to improve their marketing strategy, it may seem like the best option for expanding their outreach is to find a secret line of communication.

However, there are plenty of ways to develop and improve your marketing without venturing into unknown territory. A focus on the communication networks your office has already established is key to both optimizing your marketing efforts and increasing your revenue.

At Weave, we understand how important these preexisting lines of communication are to helping businesses grow to scale. That’s why our product is designed to support and integrate the call, text, and social media efforts of small businesses. We also believe that developing your business’s email marketing is one of the best ways to gain client loyalty and discover new customers.

Part of what makes emailing so effective for professional marketers is the surprising ROI (return on investment) for email campaigns. If you’re unfamiliar with ROI¹, it’s calculated by dividing the net return on an investment by the cost of that same investment. Basically, it’s a metric for measuring the efficiency of any given investment.

Experts have determined that businesses generate $38 of revenue for every $1 spent² on email marketing. This surprising statistic is a better return on investment than other popular marketing methods, including SEO, keyword ads, and texting.

In this article, we want to show you why email marketing has such a surprisingly high return on investment. This blog post will also demonstrate how email marketing software contributes to effective email campaigns and a high return on investment.

Why does email have such a high ROI?

Emailing is a major mode of communication for consumers. There are 259 million email users in the United States, the vast majority of whom check their email daily. Though some may think that emailing will soon go away, research says the opposite: in 2019, 78% of professional email marketers saw an increase in engagement³ with emails.

Why is email marketing so effective? Let’s look at five reasons for its success.

1. Improving leads and sales

Email marketing has the potential to improve your leads and sales dramatically. Emailing drives leads by creating interest in your business and its services without coming across as pushy. Most consumers want to hear from the businesses they frequent by email, and feeding into this desire is a great way to generate new interest.

Leads can develop into sales quickly with email marketing. By communicating with customers and non-customers using a digital format, you’re able to convey more information to your target demographic in a non-threatening environment. Unlike phone calls and even text messages, emailing lets consumers engage with content without feeling obligated to respond.

This lack of pressure oddly makes it easier for email readers to relax, enjoy the content you’re providing, and then take the action in the form of leads and sales.

2. Building brand awareness

An essential part of building your business to scale is building brand awareness. For small businesses, the opportunities to create a brand may seem limited. However, thanks to email marketing, your office can cultivate its own unique brand and matching content.

As your office distributes content to those on its email list, it’s building brand awareness. This process occurs more rapidly when you’re actively developing quality content to match the service your office provides. Brand loyalty matters; it’s a distinguishing feature of the most successful businesses and corporations in the world.

By building brand awareness with email marketing, your office is taking steps toward establishing a high ROI.

3. Increasing website traffic

One of the main goals of email marketing is to push customers and potential customers to your website. Many businesses spend significant amounts of time and effort on their websites, but don’t proactively try to get people in their community to view their site.

Once people are on your site and appreciate the work you’ve done there, they’re more likely to develop the brand loyalty we just discussed and to try to connect by setting up an appointment with your office. If your business hasn’t spent much on website development, now’s the time to get started. As your email marketing campaigns drive visitors to your website, these visitors must find a well-manicured, usable site, not a holdover from the 1990s.

Emails are a vital way to drive traffic to your website, especially when they include calls to action, like scheduling appointments or making payments.

4. Providing value to customers

Not everything about email marketing is intended to boost sales. Sometimes it’s more effective to provide value through other means, like company newsletters, webinars, podcasts, and other educational materials. Sharing these materials by email generates excitement and interest in your business without forcing customers into a sales conversation.

These types of educational and informative materials can provide customers and potential customers with reasons for frequenting your business. By educating your clients, you have the opportunity to explain exactly what value you’re providing, which in turn creates customer loyalty.

If your office isn’t developing this type of content presently, you can start by developing a monthly newsletter with an email marketing tool. Even a simple newsletter can lead to a significantly higher ROI for small businesses.

5. Collecting feedback

Analytics are wildly popular throughout today’s business world. Gathering information and statistics about how your company does business is one of the best ways to learn about your strengths and weaknesses. Emailing is another place where it’s easy to collect meaningful feedback about how your business functions.

Because it’s a digital form of communication, emailing allows your business to understand which marketing campaigns attract new business and which don’t. They also give you the ability to see which of your emails gets attention from customers, helping you and your team develop into professional email marketers.

Getting feedback through an email marketing tool lets your business make adjustments to its marketing efforts, and these changes lead to the high ROI we’ve observed among those businesses dedicated to crafting a powerful email marketing strategy.

How does email software contribute to a high ROI?

Because email marketing generates a high ROI, businesses are starting to invest in mechanisms that optimize their email marketing outreach. One of the main investments businesses of all sizes make into their email marketing efforts is the acquisition of email marketing software.

How does this type of software contribute to a high ROI? Below are five important features.

1. Pre-written templates

Email marketing software supports small businesses with composing professional-looking emails that include eye-catching subject lines, an engaging introduction, and well-organized content. Administrative teams for small businesses don’t have a lot of extra time for composing masterful emails. Using pre-existing templates or designing your own templates for future use saves you time and effort.

When the emails your office distributes have an air of professionalism, they can improve your leads and sales. Figuring out your messaging with the help of an email marketing tool is a crucial step toward seeing a higher ROI.

2. Image libraries

Most professional emails contain some form of imagery, even if that image is as simple as a company logo. Although creating an image-heavy email can be problematic, having a couple of quality images can have a lasting impact on customers. The right email marketing tool includes a library of free images fit to pre-existing templates that make adding photos to your emails incredibly simple.

For businesses that realize the importance of brand awareness, email imagery is a big deal. Your office should be sharing its logo whenever possible and creating a visual experience to go along with your written content. Email marketing software lets your team develop its own aesthetic with the help of an image library.

3. Calls to action

Part of getting a high return on investment for emailing is calling your customers to action. These calls to action don’t necessarily have to be sales-oriented, but they should always encourage your audience to engage with your business. Emails are most effective when they include Call-to-Action buttons, which are essentially attractive links that bring email users to scheduling, payment, and other pages.

These buttons, which are easy to place in emails with the help of good software, can also give readers access to your website. As previously mentioned, website traffic generally bodes well for overall revenue. Once your website is running smoothly, use CTA buttons to lead customers there and see your ROI increase.

4. Testing capabilities

If you and your administrative team are expending a lot of effort on emailing, you’ll want to ensure that the content you’ve developed arrives intact. Sending out test emails is a slow, clumsy process without the help of an email marketing tool. With some software assistance, you and your team can run internal tests and be ready to send email blasts in minutes.

While emails can provide value to customers through educational materials and other creative outreach, this value is undercut by grammatical mistakes, poor organization, oversized images, and faulty links. By running email tests with an email marketing tool, your office can make sure it shares only the highest quality content, leading to a significant return on investment.

5. Advanced analytics

Business communication software allows companies to gather statistics about the types of calls being made and missed, the types of appointments being scheduled and canceled, and the types of payments being collected. An email marketing tool gives businesses the ability to analyze their email outreach in similar ways.

Without analytical capabilities, it takes longer to realize what’s working in your campaigns. Just as analytics can optimize your calling, scheduling, and payments, gathering information about your email marketing with the right software speeds up your move toward a high ROI.

Learn about Weave’s Email Marketing tool.

It’s hard to find a better return on investment than developing your email marketing strategy. By improving sales, building brand awareness, increasing website traffic, providing value, and collecting feedback, email is an asset for any business trying to optimize its marketing efforts.

Adding an email marketing tool that includes a template and image library, CTA buttons, testing capabilities, and an analytical component gives your office the best chance to get a high return on investment.

As part of our complete business toolbox, Weave provides small businesses with all of the email marketing features listed above. Our Email Marketing tool is designed to help administrators without any emailing expertise become professional marketers with only a few minutes of training.

Watch a demo to see how Weave’s Email Marketing can maximize your return on investment.