Emails To Advance Strategy For Small Business Emails For Beginners
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies for small businesses. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing on average sees a 4300 percent return on investment (ROI) for businesses.
It’s important to understand that a lot of your success with email marketing depends entirely on the email marketing software you choose because they are responsible for making sure that your emails get delivered.
Launch Your Small Business Email Marketing Strategy in Easy Steps
1. Build your email list
First step to sending email marketing campaigns is building a contact list. After all, what good is an email marketing campaign without anyone to send it to?
The best way to build your list is by creating a signup form and featuring it on your website, blog, and social media. For the best results, we recommend setting up a double opt-in sign-up form.
Email Marketing-How To Create Rules In Gmail To Filter Your Emails Double opt-in sign-up forms send new subscribers a confirmation email after they’ve submitted their email address. While this adds an extra step to the sign-up process, it is worthwhile. Double opt-in help:
Avoid deliverability issues from email address typos;
Allow you to ask what kind of content your subscribers want to receive;
Ensures your email marketing strategy is GDPR compliant.
Try placing or linking to your sign-up forms in high-traffic places, like your homepage, blog, social media bios, and even your email signature.
How to build your email list
How do you get started building an email list, if you haven’t already? Here are some email marketing tricks for list building:
Create gated content: Also referred to as lead magnets, gated content can be downloadable assets, such as an ebook or white paper, or upgrades to the content a reader is currently consuming, such as a checklist or free template, that they can get for free in exchange for their contact information or email address.
Allow website users to opt-in: Give visitors the option to subscribe to your email list. Leverage website analytics for successful email marketing to determine which pages get the most views, then add an email sign-up form on those pages and other high-converting places on your website (e.g., your “about” page, footer, sidebar, floating bar, blog posts, resource pages, etc.).
Leverage social proof: Social proof is rooted in the belief that there is power in numbers, and that an individual’s decision can be influenced by the majority’s decision.
Include a sign-up link in your emails: Take full advantage of every email you send by always adding a link to your company’s sign-up form or website landing page.
2. Decide the types of email you want to send
Now that you’ve got a strategy to grow your email list, it’s time to decide which types of emails you want to send.
The types of emails you send will depend on what type of small business you have. It’s always safe to start with a monthly email newsletter. Some other examples might include:
Promotional emails for special offers or sales
Seasonal messages for holidays or special events
Personalized discounts and coupons for your most dedicated customers
Transactional emails (e-commerce receipts, appointment notifications, etc.)
3. Create your email design and content
The next step to creating an effective small business email marketing campaign is email design and content creation.
Email design
Most email marketing tools have easy-to-use drag-and-drop editors so that even beginners can design stunning email marketing campaigns.
The number one thing to keep in mind with small business email marketing is that you don’t need to be over the top with your designs. Email is supposed to save you time, so don’t break your back by creating overly elaborate and complex emails.
Instead, stay true to your brand image. You’ll come across as more familiar and relatable to your subscribers.
Email Marketing: How To Avoid Spam Filters Another important part of email design is the call to action (CTA). Make sure you add a CTA button that corresponds with the content of the email and tells readers what you want them to do. Here are some common CTA examples:
Read an article on your blog
Browse through new products on your site
Make a purchase using a discount code
Download an ebook, attend a webinar, or access other gated content
You should also avoid having more than one main CTA. Competing calls to action send a mixed message to readers and can harm your click-through rate.
If you have more than one goal in mind for an email campaign, create a scale to let contacts know which is the most important.
4. Writing the email content for your campaigns
The most important thing to keep in mind at this stage is the customer. When designing your emails, try asking yourself what your subscribers want to see and how to provide them with value in your campaigns.
Email Marketing Is Best Option In Digital Marketing When sending mass emails to all of your contacts, it’s nearly impossible to craft a message that is relevant to everyone. Instead, try grouping contacts with similar needs or interests to send more targeted and higher-quality content.
Try segmenting your contacts by:
Demographics, e.g., gender, age, location
Purchase history, e.g., preferred product categories, number of purchases, whether or not past purchases were during promotions or sales
Brand loyalty, e.g., new leads, longtime customers, VIPs
Email engagement, e.g., customers who click on all of your emails vs. those who have never opened an email
Another important aspect of email content creation that’s easy to overlook is the subject line. These few words are the first thing your audience sees from your campaign. For this reason, make sure your email subject line is eye-catching but not overly promotional.
5. Send your campaign and analyze the performance
To make the most of your marketing efforts, you should always be analyzing the performance of your campaigns. Email is unique in this regard.
Compared to other digital marketing channels, email provides a wealth of data and statistics to help improve your future campaigns.
Some essential metrics to keep track of include open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate. For more details on tracking your campaigns’ performance, check out this article on email marketing benchmarks and KPIs.
How Email Marketing Works
Wondering how to get started with email marketing? Email marketing is made up of several moving pieces, but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated. Here’s how it breaks dow
1. Start With Your List: The bottom line is that you can’t send out email marketing campaigns if you have no one to send them to. And the other thing to remember is that email marketing won’t work if you don’t have the right people on your list.
2. Add an Email Service Provider: An email service provider (ESP) lets you segment your audience, organize your list, and distribute email campaigns to your audience. You can also track the results to improve future campaigns.
A good ESP should integrate with your other marketing tools so you can turn everything on autopilot as you grow your leads.
How To Create An Email Marketing Plan That Works There are a ton of email service providers out there, but we take the guesswork out and make it easy to choose the right one for you and your goals. A bit later in this guide, we’ll list out our favorite ESPs that you can choose from.
After those two steps, it’s just a matter of refining your lists and your messaging so you’re reaching your audience and connecting with them. Plus, you’ll be able to set up some automation in your email service which will make things much easier for you.
6. Growing Your Email List
What most people do when they want to build an email list is to put an opt-in form on their website and hope that people sign up. Unfortunately, this strategy usually doesn’t work very well.
To grow your email list, you need to attract people with a compelling offer. You need a lead magnet.
What is a Lead Magnet?
A lead magnet is something awesome that you give away for free in exchange for an email address. It doesn’t have to cost you anything to create; most lead magnets are digital materials like PDFs, MP3 audio files, or videos that you can create yourself at minimal or no cost. Some popular lead magnet examples are:
ebooks
A cheat sheet of tips or resources
White papers or case studies
A webinar
Free trials or samples
A free quote or consultation
Quizzes or a self-assessment
A coupon
Email marketing tips for small businesses to try
Digital marketing is ever-evolving, which means there’s a lot to learn and improve on. But if you’re an email marketer with not enough time on your hands, keeping up can be a challenge. To help you with that, we’ve done our research and compiled several email marketing best practices you can start implementing today.
1. Use email marketing software
Email marketing is a real challenge without email marketing software. It may be okay to skip email automation in the beginning, when you only have a handful of subscribers, but as time goes on and you grow your subscriber list, you’ll need it to keep everyday, repetitive tasks off your plate.
The best email marketing software options allow marketers to automate essential B2C and B2B email marketing tasks such as capturing email addresses, adding subscribers to a list, sending autoresponders, and generating marketing analytics reports, to name just a few.
How to use email marketing software
Your email marketing software is vital for creating successful email campaigns. Used properly, it can assist with a host of things. With it, you can:
Save and organize your contacts: All of your email contacts and subscribers are saved in one place, segmented according to the various list parameters you put in place.
Use customizable email templates: Most email marketing software systems come with WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors and professional-looking templates you can use out of the box. Others let you create templates from scratch and save them for later use.
Create campaign landing pages: With landing pages, you can keep emails short by simply adding links to pages that offer more information. You can even add a buy button to get subscribers to purchase the product or service you’re promoting.
GetResponse and Sendinblue are just two of the email software options that offer landing page creation capabilities with their drag-and-drop page builders.
Segment your email list
When it comes to building your email list, personalization (more on this later) is one of the best small business email marketing techniques you can employ. Your subscribers are not just numbers or names on a list. They’re real people with unique needs who expect to be treated as such by the brands they choose to trust.
This is why you have to properly segment your email lists. You want to send content that resonates with your subscribers or answers their most pressing questions -- content they signed up for and are happy to receive, essentially.
How to segment your lists:
Market segmentation means you divide a large list of subscribers into different groups based on certain characteristics. There are four ways to segment your lists:
Demographic segmentation: This segmentation method uses variables such as age, gender, religion, income, educational attainment, nationality, race, and ethnicity.
Geographic segmentation: Segment your list by area or location, such as city, county, state, country, or continent. Geographic segments can also be broken down into urban or rural regions.
Behavioral segmentation: This technique uses customer behavioral data -- meaning, how customers interact with your business. Examples include buying patterns, the benefits customers are looking for in your product or service, how frequently they use it, and their position in the customer journey.
Psychographic segmentation: This method splits your list according to customers’ beliefs, personality traits, attitudes, values, lifestyles, and interests. If you’re an online smartphone retailer, for example, you can segment your e-commerce email marketing list according to smartphone types, such as iPhone or Android. You can further break down the Android group into the different Android phone brands.
Write captivating subject lines
We’ve been told again and again not to judge a book by its cover, but the reality is, most of us do. The same can be said about sales email marketing and other forms of email marketing -- people judge the subject lines (in other words, the covers) of your emails.
Given that, the key to getting your emails opened is a subject line that stands out in a packed inbox, especially since the number of emails sent and received around the world per day averages in the hundreds of billions.
How to make your subject lines captivating:
Best practices for subject line copy writing include using action words and a length of 6-10 words. Here’s a subject line cheat sheet from Constant Contact you might find helpful. Once you have those down pat, consider the following email marketing campaign tips for subject lines, too:
Create a curiosity gap: Between what we already know and what we still need or want to know is a space called the curiosity gap. Use it to your advantage. In other words, pique your readers’ interest with your subject line to get them to click.
A/B test your subject lines: Any list of effective email marketing tips won’t be complete without testing, testing, and more testing. When you A/B test your subject lines, you send two different versions to two different sub-groups of your contacts with the goal of learning which fares better in terms of open rates. Then, you can send the rest of your subscribers the email with the winning subject line.
Nail your preview text: Although it’s not exactly a part of the subject line (and it can be hidden or displayed depending on your preference in most email clients), the preview text -- sometimes referred to as the preheader text -- is a snippet of text that shows up next to an email’s subject line when viewed from the inbox.
Maintain a consistent sending schedule
Someone joins your email list because they want to hear from you. If you consistently send them helpful content, they will come to expect -- and even look forward to -- your emails.
How to keep an email marketing schedule:
Email marketing is a process, not a one-time event. Because it’s a process, consistency is key to achieving satisfactory results.
Create an email marketing calendar: A marketing calendar lets you plan and execute your marketing campaigns more efficiently. It shows you which campaigns are coming up so you can better allocate resources and distribute responsibilities.
Identify the best days and times for sending emails: Most research studies suggest that midweek -- Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays -- are the best days to send an email, while 10 a.m., 8 p.m., 2 p.m., and 6 a.m. are the best times. You may have to conduct your testing to determine the best days and times for your specific audience.
Avoid the spam filter
Within email marketing, there are several digital marketing terms you’ll hear a lot. One of them is spam filtering. Spam or email filters prevent unwanted or malware-infested emails from reaching recipients’ inboxes.
Internet and email service providers use them on both inbound and outbound emails to protect their customers.
How to keep your emails from the spam folder:
Although spam filters are generally a good thing, the problem is that messages from email marketers with no ill intention sometimes get filtered, which can cause reputational damage and email deliver ability difficulties that can be hard to reverse.
To avoid spam filters, consider the following email advertising tips:
Avoid spam subject lines: Subject lines in all caps or with too many exclamation points -- are just two of the indicators that an email might be spam.
Add instructions to whitelist your email address: Add a message that asks subscribers to add you to their safe sender's list, with a link to a post, page, or video that walks them through the process.
Make sure you have the subscriber’s permission: Think long and hard if you plan to buy ready-made lists, and use double opt-in (in which you ask subscribers to confirm their subscriptions before adding them to your list) to ensure people want to receive your campaigns and messages.
Follow email regulations: Become familiar with the anti-spam laws governing your country or state. Email service providers also have their anti-spam policies users must adhere to.
Keep your lists updated: Your lists need regular spring cleaning. Remove email addresses that are no longer valid, and unsubscribe or re-engage inactive subscribers.
Make unsubscribing as easy as subscribing: Don’t give people the runaround when they’re trying to unsubscribe. Each email you send should include an unsubscribe link or a button that’s easy to find.
Personalize your emails
One surefire way to make subscribers feel they matter is by sending them relevant, personalized emails. The more they feel you’re paying attention, the more they’re likely to pay attention to your brand.
How to personalize your emails:
Email personalization goes beyond just using the subscriber’s name in the salutation or subject line. It also means crafting individualized emails that show recipients they matter to you and that you understand what they want or need.
Aside from the email segmentation, discussed above, here are a few more email personalization techniques:
Send behavior-triggered emails: Behavioral or triggered emails are emails sent in response to a customer’s behavior or action. Examples are a welcome email right after the subscriber signs up, or a confirmation email to assure customers that their package is on the way.
Include a personalized video: Personalized videos in emails include elements unique to the recipient, such as their name, image, company name, job title, logo, etc. However, this doesn’t mean creating an original video for each subscriber. Instead, leverage the power of video personalization platforms so you can use the same video repeatedly while personalizing certain elements.
Send anniversary emails: Include discount coupons or gifts when you send your subscribers an anniversary or birthday email.
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