In this blog post, I’ll share seven reasons why setting up an automated email marketing system can transform your business – and why you should consider it!

“I want to do business with a company that treats emailing me as a privilege, not a transaction.” 

Andrea Mignolo

Email marketing is one of the rare strategies that doesn’t just work across different businesses and companies – it’s also effective across deeply varied fields, trades, and industries. However, that doesn’t mean it automatically appeals to every business owner. 

When I first started out on my own journey of creating and building a company – I wasn’t enthused about the idea of writing “e-letters” to my audience. But as I progressed, I came to realize that email marketing wasn’t simply a good idea for businesses – it is one of the most important aspects of marketing. 

The email list is where you build a relationship with your audience, helping them learn to trust you. Thus, it is also where a majority of your sales can originate – because when your audience trusts you, they’re far more willing to buy from you. 

But isn’t email outdated? The answer is no, it’s not. While so many other trends come and go in the marketing world, email has stuck around – and is still producing incredible results. While personal use of email may be on the decline, business use of email has not. People are still seeking content, information, and value – and you can provide this through your email sequence.

1. You Own This Asset

You “own” the customers that are on your email list – by which I mean, no other company can take them away from you. To illustrate, let’s consider the difference between an email list and your Facebook followers. Perhaps you have a Facebook group with twenty or thirty thousand people, and you’re seeing great results with your offers, with affiliate marketing, and with the resulting sales. 

This is all great — but Facebook can also take this group away from you (which I’ve seen happen, and which many entrepreneurs have personally experienced). They can shut you down for any reason they want. Odds are, no matter how much you fight, you’re not getting it back. And suddenly you have lost your list and your audience, without a way to reconnect. 

Odds are, no matter how much you fight, you’re not getting it back. And suddenly you have lost your list and your audience, without a way to reconnect. 

Contrast this with an email list. You have collected the email addresses of your potential customers with an autoresponder, such as ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit. You can very easily export your list to a backup system or to the cloud. And if for some reason that software company closes down, you have lost – nothing. You can start using a different email system, upload your list, and keep on going with no momentum lost.

2. Automated Email Marketing Is More Effective Than Social Media For Customer Acquisition

People who build a relationship with their audience through email are much more likely to have a potential customer turn into an actual customer than someone who only uses social media. You can also increase the chances of having your message reach your audience through email. A Facebook post, for instance, will not reach all of your twenty thousand followers. But an email sent to your email list will make it to the inbox of each specific person – and there are strategies you can employ to increase the odds of your audience opening and clicking through your email. 

It’s worth noting that I’m NOT saying social media isn’t worthwhile, or that you can’t build a lucrative business using social media. However, I AM saying that you want to be able to keep control of your audience, and you want to be able to reach them directly. 

3. Email Is Economic And Cost-Effective

Consider traditional ways of reaching customers. You can use “snail mail”, you can run ads in magazines or in a newspaper, you can use telemarketing, or – more recently – you can use paid advertising on social media. Email, on the other hand, costs only your monthly subscription to the email server (if you’re using a paid version). And once someone joins an automated sequence, the system you have already built does the work. 

4. Email Is Personal And Customizable

You have the ability to put a unique audience member’s name in each email and write as if you’re writing to one person. You may call your automated email marketing series a newsletter, but you actually want it to be more of a “letter” – a place you can be more personal. Additionally, you can tell stories about yourself, how you came to the place you’re at, and how you personally concluded that what you’re offering them works and why. 

You can tell stories about yourself, how you came to the place you’re at, and how you personally concluded that what you’re offering them works and why. 

You can also tag your audience according to their decisions and purchases, a feature that is not available through methods such as social media. This can prove extraordinarily helpful in allowing you to customize your message to a more specific subset of your audience. For example, if a number of your potential customers joined your list through a lead magnet on daily yoga, you can tag them accordingly and send out a specific campaign on a yoga product just to them. It also allows you to make sure you’re not bombarding your list members with a product they don’t need – e.g. if they’ve already bought your course, you don’t want to keep telling them about it with the rest of your audience. 

5. Email Is Action-Oriented

You can “trigger” your list to respond to audience choices. As above, if someone purchases a product, you can automatically trigger that person to be moved to another list you’ve created. And as you develop your product list, you can continue to send appropriate offers to the different lists you’ve created. I love this feature. You can see how it works in the program I use to collect emails. They have a free trial and training available.

A note on this: it’s proven that action-oriented emails are much more effective than a simple newsletter. Always incorporate a call-to-action (CTA), even if it’s as small as “Comment below!” You could add a poll or a survey to your email as well. 

6. Email Is Measurable

Years ago, you might have sent out bulk mail advertisements for your company, but you wouldn’t have had any strong way to measure what happened to them. Today, you can run a Facebook ad and get some analytics, but not many statistics as you can from an email campaign. Via email systems, you can learn how many people opened your email, clicked the link, and followed through on your CTA. You can also find out how many people unsubscribed. 

All this allows you to take in feedback to better design your offers. Perhaps you had an extra-high unsubscribe rate from a single email. Look at it and consider why! Or perhaps you notice that halfway down, people stop clicking your links. What can you do to keep their attention? You can also do A/B splitting and test two different subject lines to see what performs best with your audience – and then apply that feedback to future emails. 

7. As With Social Media, Email Can Reach Your Audience Via Mobile Devices

In fact, many, many people now check their email primarily on a mobile device. Whether your potential customer is at the doctor’s office or waiting at a child’s athletic event, your email goes right to their phone – and they have immediate access to it. This helps keep you top-of-mind. 

In conclusion, automated email marketing is a powerful strategy to reach your audience and grow your business. Personally, I can’t stress enough the importance of owning your list. I recently watched a couple, who had been making six figures a month in their business, lose their Facebook account and access to a major subset of their audience. However, they had different revenues for income set up, so they did not lose everything. With an email list, they can hop back up, reach out to their audience, and keep going. Without it – they lose permanent access to the potential customers they once had. 

Are you looking to build your list quickly? This is my favorite place I use to acquire emails FAST!

What’s the biggest obstacle for you in effectively using automated email marketing? Comment below and let me know! 

You’ve got this!