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52 February | 2023 Business Benefi ts of Email Marketing So, what are the general benefi ts of email marketing? ere are six of them. 1. It is permission based. Once people give you their email addresses— which you can get by simply asking for them—people have provided permission to receive emails from you, which means there's a good chance they will open and look at your emails. 2. It is a "return-business" opportunity. Email marketing provides a way for your fl ower shop to continue dialogue with customers, which helps them become repeat customers. We'll explain this in more depth later in this article. 3. It is cost effective. Everyone loves a bargain, and email marketing is certainly less cost-prohibitive than the other forms of marketing such as print, television, radio and most digital platforms. We'll provide a few examples of digital platforms shortly. 4. It offers opportunities for segmentation and personalization. You get to control just who sees your marketing—unlike with broadcast or print advertising. If you have more detailed information on your customer base, you can streamline your marketing based on a customer's location, gender, age and more. By creating personalized content, you can add specifi c calls to action (CTAs) and insert recommended products based on each customer's activities, preferences, lifestyle and needs. 5. It offers a great return on investment (ROI). Email marketing is great for small businesses that have budget constraints. It is a low-cost form of marketing, and it typically produces a high ROI. As mentioned earlier, Omnisend says businesses can expect an average return of $40 for every $1 they spend on email marketing. Similarly, Litmus Software puts that number at $36 for every $1 spent, based on its survey of more than 2,000 businesses. NOTE: ROI varies from industry to industry and business to business, but our experts suggest that retail fl orists can reasonably expect an average return of at least $25 for every $1 they spend on email marketing. 6. It is measurable. With email marketing, you can track the eff ectiveness of your email campaigns via metrics and analytics. You can track the number of "sends" versus "opens" and see if there were click-throughs to your website or other links. In addition, you can see if renewed contact with your fl ower shop was due to the messaging via a code. We'll get to more on that later, too.

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