Looking for a business model that has rapid payback with minimal investment? Take a look at the benefits of Email Marketing and what you can do with a business built around that.

The benefits of email marketing put in our hands the most powerful tools for quickly building a business that the world has ever seen. Before the advent of the internet and electronic communications the traditional channels of marketing involved much more cost, preparation and risk. 

Here are 5 reasons the benefits of email marketing can have a direct and lasting effect on your business today. 

1) Is the term “scalable” familiar to you?  Scalability is central to successful email marketing ventures. 

www.businessdictionary.com defines scalable as:
“Facility, plant, or unit whose size, performance, or number of users can be increased on demand without a penalty in cost or functionality”

To you as a current or aspiring online business owner this can be adapted to say “Your online business can experience increased loads in terms of customers and sales without requiring proportionally increasing amounts of work.” If you are currently a business owner than you understand this concept. In a traditional brick and mortar business like a bakery an increase in clients and sales means you have to figure out ways to increase production and hire more people without disrupting what you’ve already created. However if you are simply selling digital cookbooks online these same problems go away. You need to set up automated systems that reliably process and fufill orders. 

This is the beauty of an online business built around email marketing where many of the processes are automated. Let’s say your site is mentioned on the Oprah Winfrey show. If your site features pdf charts that teach people how to build lego models you should be able to process all your orders instantly in real time. However if your business sells the physical legos you may have a problem with fast and efficient fulfillment if you receive a flood of traffic and orders.  Say you own two websites. One sells digital diagrams teaching people how to build complex lego models. The products is an instant download. The other website sells physical legos. If both of your sites were to receive an unexpected amount of traffic which one would continue to process orders and generate income with very little input from you? The one with the diagrams of course.  

2) Contact many people at once with the push of a button.  You have the ability to promote to any number of people in the same time frame 

This point has been heavily publicized by many internet marketers. While the idea of pushing a button (the send button) and making money may be over-hyped it still remains valid. Every time you get an email from a marketer that is selling something, or an email from amazon.com letting you know about top products that week you can rest assured that there is a live person on the other end sitting at the switch. They did push a button and contact thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of people almost instantly. And yes, they are almost certainly seeing the sales start to roll in as people check their email. Push a button, send an email, make money. Sound too simple? It’s not. The process of sending an email broadcast to 5 people or 500,000 is the same. There is nothing more scalable or powerful than that. Anytime you get email from businesses large or small you can be assured that they contacted many other people along with you with the same offer. And they are watching the sales roll in from that broadcast. 

3) Contact vast numbers of people for cents instead of dollars.  Market to your target audience for pennies on the dollar. 

We all get junk mail. Credit card offers. Car insurance solicitations. Sweepstakes promotions. Ever take a close look at these from the standpoint of what went into developing the mailing? It’s amazing. Some use expensive high quality paper. Others are sent in official looking envelopes. There are all kinds of expensive copywriting techniques used to entice the individual to open the letter. Not to mention the always present cost of sending a physical letter. With these types of direct mail promotions there is cost involved to generate the mailing. Then they have to send the letters and wait to see if it is successful. With this caliber of investment the results have to be successful. The comparison I’m drawing here is utilizing the benefits of email marketing you can contact the same numbers of people for next to nothing. You can also do unusual and/or weird marketing tests via email without the financial consequences associated with a direct mail promotion. Forget about direct mail. The costs of sending promotional mail are enormous. For starters you’ll have a tremendous amount of market research to do. Leads and addresses to purchase. Copywriters to hire. And the letters themselves need to be sent too. Sure you can make money at it, people do every day. But the beauty of email is the ability to contact your subscribers at a moments notice for next to nothing. Of course a good email marketing service will cost you but nothing compared to sending out 10,000 pieces of mail most of which will get thrown away without being opened. If your email is thrown away (deleted) without being opened, no worries. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much. 

4) With Email Marketing people actually choose to have YOU contact them.  A Benefit of Email Marketing, your subscribers choose YOU!

This is powerful. It’s much better to have a person make a conscious decision to opt into your list to receive emails from you as opposed to buying their name from an organization that sells leads and then contacting them. If you bought their name they’ve never heard of you and the result may be less effective than if they already know your name and business. Of course this is a generalization. It depends on many factors including demographics, past buying history and personality. But at the end of the day put yourself in the shoes of your leads. Would you be more likely to respond to “Marketer Joe” if you’d read his blog, downloaded some of his free reports and signed up for his list? Or would you respond better if this marketer contacted you via a list they are renting? No brainer really.  Subscribers on your list made a conscious decision to hear from you. This gives you much more leverage than if you simply bought their information from a lead company. A much higher percentage of people on your list are going to know who you are and what your message is. This equates to time saved as you don’t have to spend as much time educating leads who chose to sign up to your list. They are already sold on you in a sense, or at least they have a spark of interest. Purchased leads have no say in the matter of being contacted.  

5) When you build an email subscriber list for the purpose of email marketing you are building both a business and an asset. Owning an email list will open up more doors than you can imagine. It instantly turns you into a player in the market. 

A list you’ve built is YOURS. You are free to mail it anytime you want with whatever offers you desire. There are no stipulations on how often to send or fees to pay. If you rent a list or buy leads they are not yours. Sure you can be making a killing with that business model but you won’t be a player in the “Own Your Own List” arena. Here’s the thing- there are many many people out there who currently have their own lists. If you don’t have your own list then there is very little either of you can do in terms of working together. However if you have a 10,000 person list of people interested in learning to start their own online business you’ll have no trouble locating other people who have similar lists. This is where the magic happens, you can promote each others products to your respective lists. At this point you’ve become a legit business owner. You actually have something to show for your efforts.