Most people are not proponents of email marketing. We immediately think of the word SPAM and then a trash can icon. But if you are taking notes at marketing conferences, paying attention to studies of industry research and social media conversations, you will come to the realization that it can be used as a powerful tool for business.

Email should be a natural and profitable complement to other SEO offerings. Local businesses, especially, should already use email marketing. Let’s set the case for ‘why’.

ROI – High

Marketers have consistently ranked email as the top-performing channel because of the return on investment of 44:1. It’s particularly true for B2B companies. It is by far the most preferred way to obtain information from a business.

Inexpensive

Music to a business owner’s ears. Some email service companies such as MailChimp comes free up to 2000 subscribers. Many other offers come out to under $10 per month subsequent to your number of subscribers. If you can get your message out there – inexpensively – DO IT.

Helps Effectiveness of Other Channels

Critical to local business marketing is obtaining customer email addresses. Including an offer for something of value such as a discount code, newsletter subscription or loyalty program of course drastically increases the odds of winning that email address for all those purposes.

Best Current Option for Small Business

The bad news for small businesses is that the number of organic digital channels available is disappearing. Facebook just announced that basically if you do not have a budget to boost posts, you might struggle. There is also the inevitable expansion of Google’s Local Service Ad program to verticals and locales in the near future. Building email campaigns now is a proactively smart move that can help save the day once these monetization pressures increase.

Customers are familiar with email. At the very least, the language of email is the language in which everyone is fluent. Unlike the complexity of PPC or SEO, small businesses inherently comprehend email marketing. They might already be sending emails, only doing it poorly.

A Comfortable Concrete Deliverable

A lot of PPC and SEO work is done behind the scenes from the client. With email marketing, a client actually sees the email campaign delivered to their inbox. Not only that, agencies provide the statistics of that campaign: every major Email Service Provider tracks opens and clicks by default.

It Can Leverage Existing Offerings and it’s Predictable

Generally speaking, email marketing is not a party to erratic algorithmic changes or baffling ranking fluctuations. If you have great content, it will naturally attract more subscribers and customers as they receive those emails.

Expand Over Time

Email marketing provides a large number of options to expand your opportunities with customers. With SEO, the wins are upfront but get progressively harder to achieve. Email delivers a steady way to give small wins to customers over longer periods of time.

With email marketing done right, the customer is almost assured solid, high-margin, high-ROI outcomes. Email campaigns should be the bright star when providing additional services. As unpredictable algorithms are updated, emails campaigns can continue to reach the masses easily, inexpensively and when you want them to arrive.