“There are barely 100 people on our email list.”
“We have so few clients that we can email them individually; no need for email automation.”
“A spreadsheet is all we need to keep track of our customers.”
“Email automation is expensive. Not yet.”
Do any of these sound familiar? To us, they do! We’ve heard them a lot of times from small business owners and entrepreneurs. They were waiting to “grow a bit more” to start investing in email marketing automation.
When they did they realized that should have done it sooner. Much sooner. A lot of our subscribers tell us the same thing weeks after they start using our integration platform: “If I knew it would be so easy and so time-saving, I would have done it years ago.”
They’re absolutely right about this. It’s never too soon to start automating your email and your marketing in general. Got 5 email contacts? Perfect! Let’s add them to an automated flow today!
You’ll see below why that can be extremely beneficial.
Despite SO many new, shiny toys for marketers, good ol’ email is still rocking. Every $1 you invest in email marketing has an average $36 ROI.
Image via Constant Contact
It’s important to note that this ROI is usually calculated when using email automation platforms, so it’s factored into your initial investment. Moreover, if you were to send emails the old school way, you’d probably spend more just on manhours.
If you think that email (or marketing, in general) automation is soulless and impersonal, think again. Your customers want to receive your promotional offers. And they want to receive them more often than you can handle sending them manually.
Image via Marketing Sherpa
Let’s look at email from another perspective: let’s compare it with social media. It may seem like everyone has at least one social media account. But here’s a fact that’s easy to overlook: to sign up for any social media network, you need an email address.
So it’s fair to say that at first there was email and then everything else. A research report by Radicati estimates that 5 billion people will be using email by 2024. That’s half the world population, by the way! Plus, a lot of people rage quit social media nowadays, but very few of them move to a deserted island and close off their email accounts.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that email is far more effective than social media.
Image via OptinMonster
I’m an ROI-minded marketer, so my favorite takeaways from the comparison chart above are the HUGE differences in engagement and conversion rate. You know, the things that matter to your bottom line.
These are just a few numbers to remind you to master email before you move on to newer, shinier marketing solutions. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should only rely on email — we’d never advise you to put all your eggs in one basket.
But let me tell you a bit more about why email marketing — the automated kind, in particular, is should be a priority basket for your small business.
First, quick storytime: 12 years ago, when SyncApps by Cazoomi got started, we were a team of idealists. Integration and iPaaS were already a thing — we don’t claim to have invented sliced bread. What we did invent, though, was a way for smaller businesses to have access to said sliced bread.
You see, integration was SO prohibitively expensive and clunky that you needed a Fortune 500 budget to use it and a dedicated IT team for it. Our mission from day 1 was to empower businesses of ALL sizes to leverage integration. We did that through a platform that is:
That’s exactly what short-staffed and low-budget SMEs needed and that’s what we delivered and continue to deliver.
This is the reason why we also continue our educational efforts: we want to let as many entrepreneurs know that integration and automation shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. That you can use them from day 1 of your business, often entirely free until you grow your client base.
OK, enough about our history. Let’s get to the reason why we’re all gathered here today. Real examples of how email marketing automation works for SMEs.
Have you ever heard a small business owner or a solopreneur say that they have too much time on their hands? Yeah, neither did we.
“Time is money” has never rung truer than in this case. For every entrepreneur or marketer that’s short on time, email marketing automation is the way to shoot two birds with one stone.
30% of respondents in a recent survey said that the biggest benefit of email automation is saving time.
Image via Constant Contact
Our own research showed that integration (on top of email automation) can save up to 12 hours per month. That’s a day and a half your staff could be spending on strategy, not mundane, mind-numbing tasks.
You may think that you have so few clients that you can email each of them manually and that may be true — even with the time you’re willing to put in. But are you absolutely sure you have all the insights you need to send them the right email at the right time? But are you absolutely sure you have all the insights you need to send them the right email at the right time? On top of this, you may need to invest in email scraping to gather detailed data on your clients, ensuring your emails are timely and relevant.
Email marketing automation does more than send email in bulk. It can, for instance, tell you which subscriber on your list clicked which link in your previous email. Armed with that information, you can send them a relevant follow-up email — by hand if you wish, but really, why would you do that instead of saving your 12+ hours every month?
Want to take things even further?
Integrate your email marketing automation platform with your CRM or ERP to get even better insights and save more time. A quick example based on the Mailchimp for Salesforce integration:
Since you’ve got bidirectional data flow, you can also implement the reverse of this example:
Email marketing personalization is the Holy Grail that can get you more of everything: open rates, CTR, conversion rates, and everything in between.
Image via Tallmind
But ironic as it may seem, personalizing emails is easier with automation. When I say personalization, I mean going beyond the usual “Hello, Jane”.
In 2022 and beyond, personalization means relevance above all else. It doesn’t matter that you use a customer’s first name if you send them completely irrelevant emails.
A good email marketing automation platform can help you with that too. Based on each subscriber’s prior interactions with your campaigns, you can easily segment your list according to a ton of criteria. A few examples:
This is just a small sample of what you can get with email automation alone. Combined with insights from your CRM, you can also send hyper-personalized emails, like: “Hi Jane, we noticed you like our eBook about SaaS trends. Would you be interested in scheduling a call with our trend analyst to delve even deeper into this matter?”
THIS is the personalization your customers need. They don’t need a million emails to choose the three relevant ones. They only need relevant emails or silence.
Sales slumps are hard for everyone. It’s a catch-22: if sales are slow, there is no budget for fancy campaigns either.
Our advice: go back to email marketing. It’s the most affordable way to get sales and a bang for every buck you spend. Plus, you’ll be marketing to a “warm” audience, people who already know you and trust you.
It comes as no surprise that 60% of customers say that they bought something as a result of an email marketing campaign. 60%! That’s a tough number to beat!
This is something that most small businesses struggle with. No matter how memorable your logo is or how catchy your branding is, it’s still hard to get people to remember you out of a sea of other small businesses competing for their attention.
With email marketing automation, all you need is a clever email drip campaign to get stuck in their brains. An automated series takes minutes to set up (if you don’t count writing the copy for it) and it can put you on the map.
You may have seen an influencer or two weeps when Instagram shut down their account. Or ask their followers to click like on a sponsored post because the social network they are on has an abysmal organic reach.
This is why I always recommend you invest in online real estate you can actually own, like your own website and email list. These are the two assets you can build a business on with little else on the side.
Let me say that again: you won your email marketing list and no one can take it away from you. If something happens to the email automation platform you use, you can simply switch to another one and pick up where you left off.
On the other hand, if the bulk of your business comes from social media or a PPC ads platform when they decide to shut down, they’ll take your customers with them too.
No business is too small for email marketing automation. Quite the opposite: it’s the smallest of companies that can benefit the most from automation and integration.
Large enterprises have the budget and the manpower to do anything manually. For SMEs, every hour wasted on manual work is an hour they could use to grow. The sooner you invest in automation, the sooner you can start to grow at your real potential.
The budget argument is also a thin one. You can get started for free on most email marketing platforms (and on SyncApps, too!), so you can test out a lot of solutions to see which one works best for you.
