Little-Known Ways to Use Emails to Boost Your Financial Returns

Although most people use email on a regular basis, it’s still an underutilized resource for businesses trying to improve their marketing efforts. While many businesses have long known about the benefits of developing a strategy for calling and even texting their clients, they often consider emailing an afterthought.

However, 59% of consumers say their purchasing decisions are influenced by email marketing.¹ The question for small businesses should not be about whether to use email as part of their marketing outreach, but how to use email to build their clientele base and boost their revenue.

It’s clear from research that emailing isn’t going away anytime soon. 78% of professional email marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last year.² With more people staying and working from home more than ever, emailing is an important resource to develop for all businesses, from giant corporations to local mom-and-pop shops.

Some small businesses may be hesitant to invest their limited funds into an email marketing strategy. This hesitancy is understandable, but putting money into emailing is one of the best investments when it comes to marketing tools. A recent study indicated that businesses generate $38 of new business for every $1 they spend on email marketing.³

This blog post intends to explain the little-known ways email can provide this remarkable return on investment. It also shows how an email marketing tool makes implementing these emailing strategies manageable for small businesses.

Send out newsletters

Distributing a newsletter from your business is one way to use emailing. Your newsletter to customers can provide educational material and tutorials that help them understand how to take advantage of your services. It can also include seasonal greetings that keep customers informed about holiday hours and promotions.

Some businesses stick to the basics by giving a summary of the goings-on in their office, which keeps customers in the loop and lets them know that your business is dedicated to transparency and engagement with them. You can also celebrate employee and client birthdays or create a spotlight section that highlights individual contributions to your business.

Explain benefits

If you’re in the healthcare industry, it’s important to remind customers about end-of-year benefits that they should be exploring. Many clients shy away from asking questions regarding the types of benefits they’re eligible to receive. While they may not be inquiring about these benefits in person, reading about them in an email can prompt them to be more proactive.

Emailing gives businesses a long-form method for distributing information that’s cost effective. In contrast from conventional mail, email requires no physical materials and zero postage. It also enables your office to explain benefits to customers without lengthy phone conversations or massive text messages.

Promote sales and discounts

Consumers aren’t keen on being bombarded with notifications about upcoming sales and promotions by call or text. Notifying your customers about sales by phone takes up huge amounts of time for your administrative team and can come across as telemarketing. Texting customers can also be construed as intrusive if you’re only looking to push a limited-time sale or promotion.

Email is an ideal format for helping customers learn about your office’s promotional activities. As long as your email is professionally formatted and doesn’t have spam-like characteristics, you’re likely to create value with email promotions. These promotional emails are even more effective when they’re combined with a call to action.

Share business updates

Emails don’t always have to be fun or promotional. Sometimes customers only want essential information from the businesses they frequent. While brief calls and short texts can be sufficient for some customers, others are looking for a longer explanation of changes to your business and its practices.

Recent societal trends have made it difficult for consumers to know what’s going on with their favorite businesses on a daily basis. If your business is altering its working hours, closing temporarily, or reopening its doors, be sure to create and send out a well-formatted email to satisfy the needs of your customers. Email is also a great place to notify customers about safety protocols you’re adopting and the location of your new branches.

Take care of scheduling and payments

Administrative staff for small businesses are incredibly busy. They tend to a seemingly endless list of tasks, and taking care of scheduling and payments is a major part of those responsibilities. Though it’s almost impossible to completely relieve your administrative team of these duties, using email to assist with scheduling and payment collection can be an asset that boosts your employees’ productivity and your office’s revenue.

If clients are able to schedule appointments with your office online instead of in person or over the phone, it frees up your staff to support you and your clients in other, more urgent ways. The same goes for payment collection. Tracking down every single customer with an outstanding balance can be a chore; giving customers the opportunity to resolve their payments themselves through an email saves everyone time and also brings in a return on your investment.

How an email marketing tool boosts returns

Now that we’ve discussed some of the ways email drives value and opens the door for your marketing strategy, let’s consider how the right email marketing tool can make it easy for you and your team to employ these tips.

Campaign templates

Most small businesses can’t afford to staff a professional email marketer. They also don’t have the time to sit down and craft perfect emails every time they want to communicate with customers. Getting your office set up with an email marketing tool makes it easy to compose professional emails with good structure and intriguing headlines.

Rather than worrying about how to compose each draft, let an email marketing tool provide you with pre-written templates that are designed by real email marketers. If your staff wants to get creative, an email marketing tool allows them to save their own material for future repurposing. Nailing the basics of emailing, like a strong subject line, can make a meaningful difference in your business’s email marketing.

Image library

Effective visuals add a lot of value to emails. People get text-only emails from their family and friends all the time; they recognize how visuals like properly-formatted photos and logos distinguish amateurs from the pros. Putting images in each of your emails can build your office’s brand and improve customer loyalty.

Administrative teams don’t have the time to search for perfect pictures, let alone ones that will fit neatly into the body of their emails. Having an image library on hand through an email marketing tool makes it easy for you to create sleek emails that catch your customers’ attention. These stock photos are already designed for quick placement into campaign templates, so your team can simply plug and go.

Call-to-Action buttons

Emails boost your revenue not because they get customers to admire your business from afar, but because they encourage them to take action. All of the methods we described earlier in the post are meant to inspire action, either directly or indirectly. Placing a “call-to-action” button in each email is another way to get your clients to connect with your business.

A call-to-action button is basically a dressed up link that brings customers to other pages for interacting with your business. Providing a visual beyond the standard underlined link catches your customers’ eye and makes it more likely that they’ll schedule an appointment or take care of an overdue payment. Using email for these calls to action can bring in the segment of your clientele that avoids phone calls and text messages.

Test emails

Your office team can edit and spell check their emails many times over, but the real test of emails is how they come across in your customers’ email boxes. Many businesses distribute their emails only to find out that their images aren’t formatted properly, their links don’t work, and their subject lines contain errors. Running test emails through an email marketing tool prevents offices from making critical mistakes.

An email marketing tool lets you create addresses and then view your email drafts from these addresses. Once you have this test circuit set up, it’s easy to run tests quickly before sending out each email. Stopping errors in your email marketing helps build your unique brand, establish a rapport with customers, and ultimately drive revenue.

Advanced analytics

Though it’s possible to learn from your email marketing through trial and error, it’s also important to rely on technology to understand what’s working within your outreach and what’s not. A good marketing tool empowers you and your team to analyze business and payments numbers to determine how to compose emails.

Segmenting emails after considering the statistics you’ve gathered with the help of advanced software allows you to target key groups within your clientele. Your emails don’t need to go out to every customer, every time. Using analytics to make calculated decisions regarding your email marketing strategy ensures that you get a high return on your investment.

Weave’s Email Marketing

Our Email Marketing tool is designed to support our customers in their efforts to create newsletters, updates, promotions, and calls to action that resonate with their clients and bring in higher returns. It provides small businesses with templates, an image library, call-to-action buttons, testing capacity, and analytical capabilities, making anyone perform like an email marketing expert.

Watch a free demo with Weave to see how our Email Marketing tool can boost your financial returns.

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Notes:

1. https://www.salecycle.com/blog/stats/18-essential-email-marketing-statistics/
2. https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing/email-marketing-trends?_ga=2.30201983.1394422101.1585079140-536524719.1584979303
3. https://www.emailmonday.com/dma-national-client-email-report-2015/