6 Benefits of Email Marketing for Service-Based Businesses

Email marketing isn’t going anywhere. Especially as small business owners, it’s a marketing channel that can’t be ignored. This post is specifically for service-based businesses that are ready to leverage email marketing as a powerful marketing tool for their business. If you’ve already gotten started with email marketing, this post may offer you helpful advice to ensure you’re using email marketing to its potential. 

While there are more than just six benefits of email marketing, this post will cover the six main benefits of email marketing for service-based businesses. If you’re a product-based business owner, jump over to this post where we break down the six main benefits of email marketing for product-based businesses! 

1. Stay in touch with warm leads

A warm lead is essentially an ideal client who is already “warmed up” to the idea of working with you. A warm lead likely knows who you are and what services you offer. A warm lead may not know if they want to work with you or not yet, but they are open to learning more. When someone joins your email list, they are giving you the green light to be in their inbox. This is your golden opportunity to share more about yourself and your business. Emails are a perfect place to increase the like, know, and trust factors with your subscriber. 

Warm leads may become subscribers via a lead magnet (like a discount code or freebie), or a low ticket offer, or just because they wanted to hear from you! Regardless of of how or why they join your email list, you should have them go through an automated welcome sequence immediately after subscribing. This welcome sequence is a great opportunity to share more about you, your business, why you started your business, how you hope to help them, and more. After the subscriber goes through this automated welcome sequence, you can start sending them newsletters–along with the rest of your subscribers! 

The goal is to stay top of mind for your email subscribers. Your automated sequences and your newsletters are great ways to accomplish this goal. 

2. Showcase your expertise 

Use your email list to showcase your expertise and provide value where you can! People love getting tips and tricks that they can apply in their own lives or businesses. With your email list, providing free, valuable, and actionable content is absolutely key. Sharing useful tips in your newsletter or linking to blogs that you’ve written will provide proof that you’re a subject matter expert (SME). We encourage you to stick to the 80/20 rule with email marketing–80% of your content should be of value, and 20% of your content can include selling. By only talking about your products, services, or offers 20% of the time, you’re showing that you care more about educating your audience than you do about selling to them. This approach will help build trust with your audience and keep you out of the “sleazy sales” category of online business owners. 

Bonus: Showing potential clients you know what you’re talking about will put their trust in you and make them more likely to want to work with you. 

3. Build relationships with your audience

Building relationships with your audience is key, and thankfully, email marketing makes it pretty easy! When sending newsletters, treat each subscriber like a VIP. Include personalization in your emails and keep your content friendly and engaging. Make each email you send sound like a letter from a friend. We love using emojis, GIFs, personal life updates, and breaking some writing rules to make emails sound super conversational. 

People want to feel like there is a real person behind the brand they are potentially buying from. So infuse your personality into each marketing email to connect with your audience. Before sending your newsletter, read your content out loud. If it doesn’t sound like you, don’t send it yet. Make some edits to make sure the words sound relatable and like they’d come out of your mouth! For solopreneurs, this is super important. 

Get more tips for how to write for your audience over on this blog.

4. Speak directly to different segments of your audience

As your email list grows you can begin to segment your audience based on interests, their place in your sales funnel, where they live, and much more. You can almost think of this like targeted social media ads… but it’s for freeeee. Building out segmented audiences over time will help your emails feel more personal and will allow you to target your audience more effectively due to the specificity of your message. A study done by Campaign Monitor suggests that business owners who used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue! If you have a large email audience and you aren’t using segmentation yet, why are you sleeping on this?!

5. High return on investment

We suggest first building up the relationships with your audience and providing free valuable information week after week. Once you’ve built strong relationships you can then throw in some “sales” content. You can start to tell your subscribers about your new services, give exclusive discounts, and let them be the first to book new offers. For the best results stick to the 80/20 rule where you provide 80% value and only 20% sales like we mentioned earlier. Email marketing continues to provide some of the best ROI out of all of the marketing strategies. Here are some email marketing stats we love to hear:

• Email is 40x more effective at acquiring new customers than social media

• For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $41 in ROI

Email marketing isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. If you own a small business, it’s time to jump on the email marketing bandwagon. 

6. You own your list 

It’s important to remember that we don’t own any of the content that we put on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or Pinterest. Here’s the deal: We will NEVER hate on social media because we understand the value of every layer in a marketing strategy. Social media and email marketing are both layers to a comprehensive marketing strategy. But many online business owners are relying solely on social media and ignoring email marketing because they don’t think they need it. This is where we challenge you. If you’re putting all your eggs in the social media basket, what happens when your account gets hacked? When a platform shuts down? When the algorithm changes?  Email marketing and social media can work together beautifully–they are on the same team, and they have the same goal of winning the game, but just play different positions on the field. 

Are you ready to leverage email marketing as a powerful marketing tool for your business? We’re here to help create a strategy and use email to its full potential. Send us a message to get started.