Benefits of Email Marketing for Your Business: How To Get Started

Email marketing benefits and tips to help you optimize your campaigns.

Businesses achieve incredible results using email marketing strategies and automation software—and the stats don't lie: Nearly half (47%) of marketers state that email is their most effective marketing channel, offering up to a $32 to $45 return for every $1 spent on email marketing, depending on the industry.^[1,2]

This guide highlights some of the core benefits of email marketing, plus tips to help you optimize your email marketing campaigns to achieve the highest possible ROI.

What are the benefits of email marketing?

Email marketing benefits are vast, but only when you take the right approach. According to Gartner's Digital IQ: Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2022 report, 64% of consumers and B2B buyers report feeling overwhelmed by brand communications.^[3] To get the most out of every campaign, you must ensure a clear value exchange at sign-up, prioritize messaging relevance through personalization, and balance email types. 

Get that recipe right, and you can benefit from all the advantages of email marketing, including the following.

1. The ability to craft personalized, segmented content

Greater personalization is one of the top benefits of email marketing, yet it's one that many are missing out on. Nearly half of consumers reportedly "like" brands' emails that reference personal details about them—yet only 31% of brands' emails use personalization.^[3]

As you build your list of email subscribers, you can segment subscribers based on their preferences, behaviors, location, etc., allowing your business to reach the right person at the right time. By leaning on personalization and segmentation, you can help strengthen relationships and boost conversion rates. This benefit is something that other marketing channels can't achieve. 

2. Boost brand awareness

If your goal is to increase brand awareness, you need to communicate with your customers regularly. You want to remain at the forefront of their minds—breaking through the digital noise. Email marketing provides a solution, ensuring your subscribers are constantly informed about what's going on with your business. 

Marketing automation is helping businesses take this objective to the next level, offering ways to generate qualified leads. Automated emails help you save time while keeping current and potential customers in the loop. For many, this results in greater productivity and a higher ROI without much additional effort. 

Check out some of the best web-based email marketing software options to optimize campaigns through automation. Use these tools to keep your brand relevant and consistent.

3. Increase sales and achieve a higher ROI

What is the ROI of email marketing? This question is a commonly searched phrase as businesses determine the next steps when developing a new email marketing strategy. Is launching a new email marketing campaign worth their time and effort?

Email marketing provides an excellent avenue to increase sales across all industries. For those in the retail, eCommerce, and consumer goods sectors, the average ROI is $45 for every $1 spent.^[2]

To boost sales and ROI, create campaigns with special offers, discounts, and deals—and create a sense of urgency. A sample subject line could be "Don't miss out—50% off on clearance items ends today."

While many tactics are based on where someone is in the buyer's journey, one specific email type can help drive sales and retain customers—an abandoned cart email. If someone adds items to their cart but doesn't check out, you can send them a reminder email. The recipients were already interested in these items, so a slight nudge can help busy shoppers complete their purchases. Many options are available to help you simplify and automate this process.

4. Nurture and build loyal relationships 

Sales are crucial to your business, but this objective isn't the only reason you want to invest in email marketing. Well-executed emails aren't just for sales—they are a way to nurture customer relationships, build trust, and drive loyalty. As Josh Herbert, stylist and founder at Captain Creps, said, "Email marketing is one of the best ways to regularly keep in touch with your core target audience (who are then also much more likely to transact or interact with what you're sending because they know and trust your brand)."^[4]

Your subscribers don't want to feel like a number, so show them you understand their interests and needs. Send targeted emails regularly, focusing on the value your brand brings. Did you recently publish an educational blog post that's performing well and want to share it with your email list? When you provide interesting or informative content that is void of sales-related language, you show current and prospective customers that you're thinking about them—and that your business isn't just doing so because of the money you can make. 

As you build these relationships, be sure to deploy various email campaigns, ranging from brand story emails to seasonal campaigns. While product discovery campaigns are the most heavily used, loyalty and rewards emails have the highest open rates, at 19%.^[3]

5. Save time and money via automation

Most businesses are short on time and money. Automation is a simple, cost-effective way to optimize the usage of both these resources, encouraging a higher ROI. As you start to automate simple tasks, more time gets freed up for you to focus on other marketing channels, while increasing your ROI. 

Data shows that emails drive 320% more revenue once campaigns are automated than non-automated.^[5] That figure is tough to ignore.

How to get started with email marketing 

There is plenty to discover if you're new to email marketing, so be sure to dive deeper into best practices. Then, take a step-by-step approach when getting started:

• Define your audience to know who you're targeting and segment appropriately. Begin with your subscriber list and adjust segmentation based on evolving data. This process will be continuous as you create new customer personas, track email engagement, research geographical areas, examine purchase history, gain information from surveys, etc.

• Set goals, such as welcoming new members, promoting products, sending news and updates, driving website traffic, etc. Ensure each goal and campaign is measurable.

• Select an email marketing platform to streamline and automate processes, such as welcome campaigns, feedback requests, and post-transaction emails. Select a platform that will allow you to scale as your business grows.

• Determine campaign type, such as newsletter, promotional, content updates, re-engagement, autoresponders, etc. Some campaigns will be automated. However, when creating more specialized, segmented emails, let your customers decide what they want to read. You can set up different lists for different types of emails—let prospects and customers sign up for the lists they are most interested in.

• Build your email list, taking an organic approach. Some strategies to do so include article CTAs and subscription offers, including a sign-up link on your website or a landing page, and testing different designs to improve newsletter sign-up rates. This step is perpetual as you assemble your target audience and collect new email addresses. Use existing email lists and customer relationship management software data to build your list, request new email addresses, and create gated
  Gated content is any online material, such as a tutorial or whitepaper, requiring users to complete a lead capture form before gaining access.
  or promotional content.

• Segment your list, focusing on your audience and the goal of your email campaign. Segment based on geography, demographics, past purchases, interests, etc.

• Create your email and include a strong call-to-action (CTA). Don't forget the importance of an engaging, catchy subject line. When you invest in professional email marketing platforms, you can often source templates that make this process easier.

• Test different versions and measure your results, focusing on click-through rates, open rates, bounce rates, etc. These analytics will help you better understand what's working and what's not so that you can get the most out of your marketing budget.

Choosing email marketing software

Investing in quality email marketing software will help you create, send, and track emails an simplify processes while maximizing the benefits of email marketing.