Are you looking for ways to get more customers, more repeat sales, and bigger average transactions? Then email should be part of your marketing strategy.

If it’s not, here are two quick stories and some insane statistics that will change your mind. If you’re already using it, read on to find out ways to increase its effectiveness that you might not know about.

The other day I was talking about email with my brother Pat. He and his wife are owners of Portofino Italian Grill, a successful restaurant in Titusville, FL. His email campaigns work so well he said, “I can’t believe I have to figure out ways to slow my business down!”

There are other important pieces to his restaurant marketing strategy but email is central. He continued, “Email is great. We have nearly 5000 email addresses in there, but we have to be careful on running an “Instant Results” promotion.

After a while, you will have so many names in your database you may have to think how to slow things down…When you have a lot of contacts you can offer good [email] promotions for less outlay and still stay busy.”

Pat started building his database the first day his restaurant opened and the list grew steadily over the years. He also emailed them right from the start, initiating relationships that have lasted for years. You don’t have to have a big list to get started.

With regard to my own business history, I first envisioned email as a good tool to follow up with prospects and make the occasional sale, sort of a mass “let’s keep in touch.” But it turned out to be far more than that.

Here are just a few extra benefits I got as a direct result of sending out an email newsletter:

1. Testimonials about products, the company, and the newsletter itself
2. New product ideas resulting in the creation of dozens of new products
3. Product improvement ideas
4. More than 100 ideas for blog articles and web pages
5. Networking opportunities and introductions to people who helped me or who I was able to help
6. A steady stream of customer referrals
7. A 14-fold increase in website visitors
8. And of course, plenty of new customers and repeat business

In Growing Your Business with Email Marketing, email service provider Aweber* compiled some fascinating statistics, quoted here:

“Email marketing delivers a return of 4,300 percent, is more cost-effective than other forms of marketing, and it frees up your time so you can get back to running your business. And consumers love it.

Take a look – the stats don’t lie:

• 74% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via email
• 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of an email marketing message
• 138% more is spent by consumers who receive email offers than those who don’t

At its simplest, email marketing is a powerful communication tool for building relationships with customers…And it allows you to stay connected with loyal customers and on-the-fence prospects who otherwise may have never interacted with your brand again.”

Then there’s this from a 2015 MarketingSherpa survey: “86 percent would like to receive promo emails at least monthly and 61 percent at least weekly.” There are 15% who would like to get them daily! So no, it’s likely you’re not going to bother your customers and prospects by emailing them.

And according to a McKinsey report, email is 40 times more likely to acquire new customers than Facebook or Twitter.

No matter how you slice it, email is a valuable marketing idea. Everyone I know who puts it to work for their business gets results. It costs next to nothing to implement and it will grow your business week after week, year after year.

In fact, the first order of business here at the Small Business Rainmaker was getting our weekly email newsletter underway. Yet a weekly email newsletter is but one example of many ways you can use email to grow your business.

You can get a free copy of Growing Your Business with Email Marketing—A How-To Guide on Getting Started here. It answers your questions and offers great insight on how to use email to get big results. I’ve been using email for years and I still got some great tips from this book. It’s worth checking out, even if you already have an email service provider.

Download the book here.

* Small Business Rainmaker, by Success Publishing and Marketing, is an independently owned small business. If you buy products from some of the companies we periodically mention in our newsletter or on our website, we might make a small commission. Go here for the full Privacy Policy.