Which Businesses Benefit Most from Email Marketing?

It’s a smart and affordable way to stay in front of customers on a regular and casual basis. Studies show that over 90% of consumers check their email daily, and newsletters have even seen an increase in interaction in recent months.

The return on investment in email marketing is really high, as long as you know how to do it. You can read about its benefits and the steps you need to take to create an imaginative newsletter in this section. Today, however, we’re going to look at which types of businesses find email marketing most beneficial and why.

Regardless of the size of your business or the sector you operate in, email can offer a range of business opportunities, from generating leads to interactively involving your customers in business decisions. For example, you can let them vote on a new product, its colour or material, which they will surely appreciate (and maybe even buy).

Of course, email marketing is flexible enough to be customised to achieve complex marketing goals, depending on your needs, infrastructure and organisational capabilities.

Email marketing is a must for retailers

And if not a necessity, it would be unprofessional, to say the least, not to take full advantage of this channel. It is essential for them and can almost certainly turn marketing efforts into profit.

Based on data collection and customer information, retailers can create perfectly targeted and relevant email updates that hit the mark. What does that mean? It means that you’re far more likely to open a discount email about a product offer you’ve previously viewed than an unspecified one. The retailer can use all the data collected to drive engagement with recipients.

Think about it – which emails do you open most often? The ones that are personalised and feel like you’ve been waiting for them. Product discounts, virtual birthday or holiday greetings, invitations to events and trade shows the retailer is attending. It speaks directly to us, and of course we like it.

Financial services, insurance and banking are close behind

Why is that? Email is more serious and permanent than, say, social networks. Quite simply, we are more likely to trust something that comes to us in the form of a newsletter than a Facebook or Instagram post (or even LinkedIn).

These industries (i.e. the ones we trust with our money or our health) benefit the most from the highest open rates and subsequent conversion rates of email communication with customers.

These companies have a large amount of sensitive data about individuals, so it’s easy for them to target the subject line and content of the newsletter in a truly personal way. For example, consider a millennial who is planning to buy a house or a flat and is considering the best form of home finance. Banks collect data on savings plan preferences, Google searches and his account information, which means only one thing. Our millennial receives an email with a savings plan to help him reach his goal.

Tourism and hospitality? Email marketing makes sense for these industries too

They found this out during the pandemic when they introduced online ordering, food collection and other features they wanted to introduce to their customers. Something as simple – yet sophisticated – as email marketing also helped the hardest-hit industries survive the pandemic.

Emails informed people of opening hours, the number of people on the premises (during the period of restrictions), and even whether they might have encountered someone potentially infected during their visit. Transport companies informed customers that their vehicles had been disinfected and were still ready for use.

Hotels sent out information about when, where and how they would be operating to make it as easy as possible for customers to navigate the current regulations. Alternatively, they offered them loyalty discounts. All using email marketing and a few simple tools.

Non-profit organisations and civic associations have a valuable tool at their hands

They can use e-mail to collect signatures or defend the rights of the defenceless in a very efficient way. Many community groups can effectively collect tens of thousands of signatures for a good cause through email marketing.

The emails often include photos with a direct first name address followed by a request for help – financial or material. Let’s face it, isn’t it a little harder to speak up when we are addressed by name and know from the data we have collected that cage farming, the earthquake in Turkey or the war in Ukraine is a cause close to our hearts?

Courses and training at the click of a button

Email marketing is also essential for those who have chosen to do business exclusively online, offering online courses, training, language schools or even yoga classes. With just one click, you can convert your email database into real customers. Again, a well-written and personalised email is worth much more than a random post on a social network.

Let’s take a quick look at the main benefits of email marketing:

• Generates interest in customers – especially if you are a sales-oriented business, emails and other forms of personalised newsletters (e.g. birthday discount codes, etc.) have a great chance of generating interest in potential customers. Simply put, if they click through to your site from an email, there is a very good chance that they will convert that click into revenue by purchasing a product.
• They’re reminded – By sending regular, but not too frequent, emails to your subscribers’ inboxes, you’re reminding them of your business. Forgotten where to buy the best socks or hand-stitched underwear? Tell them.
• Content has a better chance of being seen – the downside of instant content on social media is that it quickly disappears and/or is swallowed up by other, even newer content. Email marketing, on the other hand, has a huge advantage – the recipient can read it at their convenience, come back to it, mark it as unread or even archive it (if it contains the discount codes mentioned above, for example).
• It is relatively cheap and easy to keep up to date – today’s email applications are very intuitive and relatively inexpensive. Some even offer limited services for free, or you can try them for a month before deciding to buy a licence. While you are collecting the data you want to share with your recipients, you can store the information in the programme on an ongoing basis. You can then edit the email into its final form and send it to thousands of email inboxes.