Why a Service Business Needs an Email Newsletter in 2024

Take a look at your competitors.

You’ll notice that most of them are sending out email newsletters.

But… why?

Aren’t newsletters a thing of the past now that social media exists?

Well, the reality is that if an email newsletter is targeted to the right person and full of valuable content, it can be an incredible way to generate sales and grow your service business.

Did you know that today over 4.37 billion people use email?

That’s up from 3.7 billion in 2017 – a 17% increase in only 6 years.

With half of the world’s population using email, there’s no doubt that email isn’t shrinking back. Instead, it’s becoming more dominant over time.

So what does this mean for you, as the owner of a service business? Since all of your potential clients have email accounts, communicating with them with a newsletter just makes sense.

In this article, we’ll break down why a service business needs an email newsletter in 2023, including exact numbers when it comes to email’s return on investment (ROI).

Let’s dive in!

What Is an Email Newsletter?

An email newsletter is a publication that offers regular communication to email subscribers. Oftentimes, newsletters include information related to a specific topic like news, personal stories, events, and important business updates.

Newsletters play a critical role in the digital marketing world, especially when it comes to email marketing. However, unlike regular marketing emails, which are heavily promotional, email newsletters often contain a higher percentage of non-sales content that’s there for educational or entertainment purposes.

Oftentimes, small businesses use an email newsletter to share helpful information about their business or topics related to their business that solve their customers’ problems. 

For instance, a construction company may send out helpful home renovation or maintenance tips to their email subscribers like how to do a DIY bathroom renovation or how to protect your home from wear and tear over the winter.

Why Are Email Newsletters Important?

So why are newsletters important for businesses?

Many people see email as an outdated form of communication. 

With advancements in communication technology like text messaging, social media platforms, and video marketing, it can be easy to think that email is just a thing we did in the 1990s and 2000s.

But that couldn’t be further from the truth!

Did you know that 89% of marketers leverage email as their lead-generation channel?

In fact, 51% of marketers admit that email marketing is their most effective marketing channel!

Service business owners can leverage newsletters as a broader part of their overall marketing strategy to generate leads and grow their business. As a foundational digital marketing tool, a newsletter gives business owners like you a reason for contacting your customers without coming across as too salesy or pushy. 

By updating your customers and prospects with important company updates, industry news, helpful tips, or other relevant information, you can stay in touch with your audience in a simple, yet effective way.

As you consistently send out newsletters to your subscribers, a percentage of them will start to see the value of your newsletters to the point where they even look forward to them or even get excited when they see them show up in their inbox. The result is increased engagement with your audience, brand equity, and even loyalty.

What Are the Benefits of an Email Newsletter?

We’ve all received annoying sales flyers and promotional cards left in our mailbox, our front door, and even on our car windshield.

Many people are still working hard to spread the word about their service business with traditional efforts like physical marketing collateral. 

The question is, How effective is it?

Well, the reality is that sending out physical pamphlets is a form of interruption marketing – where you’re marketing to someone who hasn’t asked for it. You may get a small percentage of people who respond. But the majority won’t, and many will likely be annoyed.

However, with email marketing, you’re only marketing to people who have specifically requested to opt-in to your marketing messages. They’ve literally told you they want you to market to them. 

So when you email them about your business or something related to your niche, the message is much more likely to be well-received, and the odds of a sale are dramatically increased.

Here are a few of the benefits email newsletters can offer your service business:

• Build relationships with your audience

• Promote new services and offers

• Get direct access to customers

• Increase awareness for your services

• Drive traffic to your site

• Low-cost marketing tool

• Incredible ROI

• It’s easier than ever (thanks to beehiiv)!

Why Listen to Me? I’ve managed two email newsletters over the years, including one with 100,000 subscribers and one with 30,000. I currently run a digital media business, Hockey Question, that gets over 50,000 visits per month.

1. Build Relationships With Your Audience

Owning a successful small business demands more than your ability to provide an in-demand service. Without a proper marketing plan, it doesn’t matter how skilled you are. This is especially true when it comes to your relationships with clients and prospects.

In order to build a solid pipeline of new and return business, you need to focus on building relationships with potential clients.

One of the best ways to stay in touch with your audience is with an email newsletter. It can be incredibly exhausting (and time-consuming) to try and keep up with all your contacts in your phone with text messages and calls.

Instead, your clients and leads can simply join your email list. It doesn’t matter how many people enter your sphere of influence. An email newsletter can reach millions of people. It’s a great way to build relationships with your audience at scale.

Remember, half of the world’s population uses email – and the majority of those who don’t simply don’t have reliable access to smartphones or the internet. If you live in any Western country, the majority of your target audience regularly uses email.

2. Promote New Services and Offers

The most obvious benefit – and the most important one for anyone looking to grow their service business – is the fact that email is an easy outlet to promote your business.

Let’s face it. Most service providers aren’t emailing their audience just for fun. 

Those who have been in the email newsletter game for years are still doing it because they’ve gained new clients and accumulated repeat business with it.

While an email newsletter is typically most successful when the majority of content is non-promotional, the reality is that you can certainly weave in offers and promotions to your audience. There are strategic ways you can craft your content to be both valuable and helpful while also soft or even hard-selling your services.

Once you’ve invested some time into the relationship with your audience through helpful newsletter content, it’s much easier to send out an email that pitches your services. Simply put, by consistently sending out a newsletter to your audience, you’ll be building up a type of relational equity that makes it easier to ask for a sale (and close more deals).

Plus, with an analytics-driven email platform like beehiiv, you’ll have a better understanding of who your audience is, including their wants and needs, so you can craft services that solve those pain points. 

3. Get Direct Access to Customers and Leads

Want to know the most frustrating part of marketing? When your efforts don’t have the chance to convert because your message doesn’t even reach your prospect or lead.

If you’ve ever created physical marketing materials like pamphlets, flyers, or posters, you know how fickle they can be. If you drop off flyers or pamphlets throughout a neighborhood, a few of them will likely fly away, get colored on by a little kid, or be eaten by a dog. Even business cards somehow find a way to get lost.

Digital marketing efforts have their struggles, too.

Think about social media marketing, for example. Many companies regularly post social content to maintain a relationship with their audience. But guess what? Not every follower will see every post. Social network algorithms are volatile and unpredictable, often resulting in people not seeing the content from their favorite social profiles.

So what’s the difference with email?

You have a direct connection to your audience.

The moment you decide to communicate to your audience, all you have to do is hit “send,” and your subscribers will get your message.

This means email is one of the most reliable forms of communication, which gives you the opportunity to market your services to your audience without fear of having your message get lost in transit.

***Keep in mind, while email newsletters are much more reliable than most forms of marketing communication, they’re not bulletproof – especially if you struggle with deliverability issues.

4. Increase Awareness for Your Services

As mentioned above, if someone doesn’t get your marketing message, they don’t even have the opportunity to say “yes,” leading to an automatic “no.”

Even if you can get through to your audience by using different marketing techniques, you need to be able to stay in touch with them consistently if you want to increase brand awareness.

While you may offer an incredible service to your clients, chances are your clients don’t wake up every morning thinking about how good you are at what you do.

To stay top of mind with your audience, you need to generate awareness of your business and your services. The moment your clients and prospects wake up, the entire world is tugging on them, fighting for their attention.

They’ve got text messages, TikTok, Instagram, emails from their boss, Netflix, the radio on the way to work, and co-workers at their job site, and we haven’t even covered their spouse, children, friends, or pets competing for their attention at home.

If you’re going to convince someone to book your services, you need to first get them to think about you. The only way that’s going to happen in the modern age flooded with marketing messages and other stimuli is if you consistently take action to communicate with them.

That’s where an email newsletter comes in. 

The average email open rate is 34.46% across all industries. This means if you have a list size of 4,000, every time you send your newsletter, you could realistically expect that 1,378 people will see it.

How long would it take you to cold-call 1,378 people to let them know about your newest service offering?

A newsletter is one of the best ways to build brand awareness with your target market. It’s a simple way to give your prospects the reminders they need, so the moment they’re finally ready to pull the trigger on what you have to offer, they’re coming to you over your quiet competitor.

5. Drive Traffic to Your Site

Email newsletters aren’t just a great way to build a relationship with your audience. They’re also one of the most effective ways to generate traffic to your website.

If you offer digital services like marketing, graphic design, financial services, consulting, human resources, or admin, then this is crucial. Your website is likely the headquarters of your entire marketing operations. Chances are, your site is designed to get people to contact you or book a service.

The problem is —  no matter how wonderful your website is set up to convert visitors if you don’t have anyone coming there, then it’s meaningless.

You need a way to draw your prospects to your website if you’re going to convert them into customers. 

One of the best ways to do just that is with an email newsletter. 

Even if you own an “offline,” local service like real estate, home services, childcare, cleaning, or personal training, your website still plays a major role in generating new business.

Every time you send your newsletter out, it allows you to link back to your site. If your website is designed to convert visitors, then you don’t even always have to hard sell someone on your services in an email. Just do whatever you can to get them to your site.

This could be asking email subscribers to check out your latest blog post, your new site design, or some new media like video or to check out a helpful resource you’ve created for them.

6. Low-Cost Marketing Tool

Want to know the best part about leveraging an email newsletter as a service business owner?

Unlike most marketing efforts, reaching out to your audience is completely free (apart from the monthly price you pay for your newsletter platform).

In other words, you don’t have to pay to play every time you send a message.

Unlike paid ads that will charge you whenever your ad gets shown or clicked on, you can send a message to your subscribers whenever you want without having to pay a penny.

If you’re a new service business or if you’re simply wanting to keep expenses low to maximize profitability, then an email newsletter is one of the cheapest ways to market your services to your audience.

In fact, with beehiiv, it’s 100% free to launch your own email newsletter (up to 2,500 subscribers).

7. Incredible ROI

Email newsletters are one of the best ways to bootstrap and establish a marketing strategy when you’re on a budget. 

But keep in mind – low cost doesn’t always mean cheap. Email marketing is an incredibly profitable marketing channel and one of the smartest investments you could make with your business.

Before we dive into the ROI of email marketing, let’s benchmark it against something standard in the financial world – the stock market. The average historical return on investment (ROI) of the stock market is about 10%.

That means if you invest $1,000 per year into the stock market, you should expect to generate about $100 in return. Not bad!

If the stock market generates about 10%, how much does email earn the average business owner?

According to Litmus, the average (ROI) of email marketing is 3,600%. That’s not a typo.

That’s the equivalent return of $36 for every $1 you invest.

In other words, if you invested $1,000 per year into your email newsletter, you could generate $36,000 in return.

How’s that for a return?

If your goal is to build up a solid recurring client base, then email is one of the best investments you can make in your business.

8. With beehiiv, It’s Easy To Get Started!

Crafting a well-thought-out newsletter strategy for your service company can be one of the most effective ways to grow your business.

Whether you’re a solopreneur or you have a team behind you, by implementing an email newsletter, you’ll be able to stay in touch with your audience, build brand awareness, and turn leads into customers for a low cost (and high ROI).

The foundation of any successful strategy begins with the software you choose to manage your newsletter. With a platform like beehiiv, it’s never been easier to start a newsletter.

Built by the same crew that scaled the Morning Brew newsletter to millions of subscribers, it’s the newsletter platform built for growth. Our all-in-one platform was created by newsletter publishers for newsletter publishers. 

There’s never been a better time to start an email newsletter. Launch yours for free on beehiiv today!