5 Email Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Email marketing is a cost-effective way to gain and retain customers for your small business. However, it requires commitment. Also, you have to learn marketing tips and tricks that will work for your business. This article highlights some of the key tips that can be helpful when running email marketing campaigns for your small business.

Use Sign-Up Forms That Work

Email marketing will only be beneficial to your company if you have a significant number on your mailing list. Therefore, the first step you should take is to ensure you have a well-crafted sign-up form on your website. There are two factors you should consider when setting up your sign-up form. One, you should ensure that it is strategically located. It should be easy for your website visitors to locate the form but at the same time, it should be placed in such a way that it doesn’t distract the visitor. Secondly, the design and the message of the form should entice the visitor to sign up. Try different designs, messages, and locations until you find the one that works best for your visitors. According to this HuffPost article, sign-up forms should be pleasing, easy to fill out, and shouldn’t ask for more than 3 or 4 pieces of information.

Identify Types of Emails to Send and Sending Frequency

Don’t start any campaign without a solid plan. First, start by identifying the types of emails you should be sending to customers and how often you should be doing it. With a plan, it will be easier to accomplish the goal and avoid procrastination. Also, when everything is clearly defined, you avoid sending emails that add no value to the subscriber. The type of emails you send will depend on the nature of your customers. Examples include welcome emails, promotional emails, newsletters, transactional emails, cart abandonment emails and request review emails to mention but a few. For the frequency, you shouldn’t send too many emails, but also the gap between two emails should not be so long that the subscriber forgets about you. When you start sending the emails, you can give your subscribers an option to choose the emails they would like to receive and how often so as to avoid overwhelming them with too much mail.

Segment Your Lists Before You Hit Send

Sending one email to all subscribers on your lists sounds like the quick and easy way, but it is an approach that doesn’t pay well. The better approach is to segment your lists based on individual interests, age, and other factors and then send more relevant emails to each segment. Email segmentation in digital marketing is beneficial because it boosts engagement levels, conversion rates, and sales. This is because segmentation also allows you to communicate with your customers in a personalized way. Also, it keeps your emails relevant and this protects your business from being marked as spam.

Work on an Email Design and Content that Converts

After getting people to sign up, the next step is to work on getting them to stay and take some action. Whether it is buying a product, signing up for a course, or reading a blog post you just wrote, your emails have to be very convincing for your subscribers to take action. If you are doing the marketing yourself, you can make use of online resources to learn how to craft good emails. You can find these on email software and services providers’ website or marketing blogs. This Sendinblue blog post, for instance, gives an overview of how to create a newsletter step by step. Sendinblue is a company that started out as a digital agency and is currently offering cloud-based digital marketing tools. The headline of your email is what will get people to subscribe, and the content is what will drive conversions. Therefore, as you choose your templates, work on your copywriting too. This Forbes article highlights gives a highlight of the best and worst email subject lines, as discussed by Forbes. You can refer to the article "What is the Ideal Business Email Response Time "to know the correct response time to email.

Get Subscribers Via Social Media

Other than the sign-up form on your website, you could also get subscribers from social media. If there is one place where you will find a good number of your customers and prospects, it is on social media. Thus, you need to work on your social media following and then use opt-in forms to get more people to join your mailing list. As you implement new strategies and send emails to your subscribers, don’t forget to measure the success of everything you do. For instance, when you send an email, check the open rate, click through, conversion and shares. When you have a new opt-in or sign up form, check the number of sign-ups to see if it is working. If you don’t good results, you may have to go back to your design, maybe change the colour of your call to action button, find better headlines, rewrite your message again, or get a new template for your newsletter altogether.
 

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