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Top Email Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
Some business strategies are bigger needle-movers than others. Small business owners must focus on those things first for efficiency and profit.
One such focal point is email marketing. This direct business-to-customer (B2C) marketing strategy has proven fruitful over time despite ever-evolving marketing practices.
Most entrepreneurs might never guess that popping into their potential customers’ inboxes could significantly impact their customer relations or bottom lines. It’s true, though–trends favor email marketing over social media.
Here’s what you, the small business owner, can do to grow your business with email. You’ll improve your bottom line and efficiency.
Adopt A Funnel Tool
As you grow your business and email subscriber list, you’ll want a tech-savvy tool to help you handle all the ins and outs of maintaining your newsletter or email campaign.
A SaaS solution like a funnel-builder can alleviate many headaches and time spent on the nuances of writing and sending emails. Here’s how a capable email-building tool can help:
- Save time by storing contact information
- Target your audience by segmenting users
- Quickly circulate emails using templates and email automation
- Increase conversions with landing pages
- Format responsive emails that autofit to your reader’s screen size
- Stand out with branding capabilities
- Gain insights on what works best with A/B testing and tracking
- Maintain good legal standing with email opt-ins and opt-outs
- Do it all without knowing how to code
Build Your List
You can’t market through email without an email list. Read more about building an email list here.
With email, you own your content. It can’t be taken away from you, unlike social media platforms. Use your emails to create lead magnets, such as downloadable files, content upgrades, trial periods or sizes, discounts, or freebies. Users subscribe to company email lists hoping for special offers and sneak peeks at new products, so give them what they want.
Keep It Legal
Rules and regulations dictate who you can send emails to. You may only send promotional or business emails to those who have given you permission.
Your email software can help you build opt-in and out forms for your website as an on-page form, link, or popup. When designing your signup form, make sure that it:
- Is simple for the prospect to fill out. (You only need email addresses.)
- Has a clear call-to-action (CTA)
- Re-confirms with the patron that they agree to receive emails using either an on-screen notification or an automated email
Segment Your Audience
Your email list is real people with real needs. Furthermore, those real people love specialized treatment from the brands they follow. For these reasons, it’s best to segment your customers.
There are a couple of ways to do it:
- Demographically–Location, gender, personal preferences, industry, career
- Behaviorally–Shopping, spending, clicking, and browsing habits
Research your audience so that you can create content that resonates with your subscribers, fulfilling a need or desire.
Personalize Your Emails
Putting your recipient’s name in the subject line increases their odds of opening it. In addition, behavior-based means of personalization help your conversions and click-through rates (CTR).
For example, send welcome emails when visitors first sign up with you. Anniversary, thank you emails, and order confirmations go a long way to making your customer feel special. Additionally, emails containing videos improve your CTR.
Grab Your Audience’s Attention
Use attention-grabbing subject lines, and A/B test them to see what gets the better results. Send yourself a test email to see how the preview shows up in your inbox to get an idea of what your audience will see.
Avoid Getting Blocked
To prevent filters from sending your email to the spam folder, use an email-building tool and the following email advertising tips:
- Get permission. This means no buying lists from someone else. Consider using double opt-in permissions in which you ask subscribers to confirm their subscriptions before adding them to your list.
- Instruct users to approve your email address on their end. Add directions or a link to instructions that guide them through the process.
- Avoid obviously “spammy” subject lines, like lots of exclamations or all capital letters.
- Familiarize yourself with anti-spam laws. Your email service provider will also have its own anti-spam policies you must follow.
- Make unsubscribing easy. Include an unsubscribe button or link that isn’t hard to find.
- Update your lists periodically. Remove invalid email addresses. Unsubscribe addresses that requested it and try to entice inactive subscribers.
Send Consistently
One of the best pieces of advice is to continue trying to engage with your subscribers. Remember, they opted in to receive your content. Send consistently and schedule it using your funnel-building tool.
What should you write about? Start by building a relationship with your subscribers, giving them little bits of your story over 7-10 days. This is called a soap opera sequencing style.
Then, once you’ve built a bond and an attractive character, switch to writing about anything and tying whatever you’re talking about back to your product. This is a Seinfeld-style of email marketing.
Want to learn more about soap operas and Seinfeld email marketing? Click here to read or listen to this powerful two-punch email marketing strategy that works wonders.
Email Works
While social media outlets can get your target audience’s attention, achieving and maintaining results is more complicated than email campaigns.
First, you don’t own those platforms. If you inadvertently break one of their rules against advertising, you could get yourself banned. That could cost you your entire contact list, time, money, and data.
Secondly, social media requires constant real-time engagement to convert a few of your many followers. Sales plugs get largely ignored, and you’ll juggle several profiles to maintain your brand presence.
Email marketing is the preferred method of gaining your prospect’s attention effectively and efficiently. And any small business owner can utilize our top tips to start earning more conversions and revenue.
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