Regardless of the industry your small business is focused on, email marketing is key for boosting your personal relationship with customers while helping to grow your brand to the next level. Plus, it involves a minimum investment! Although we’ve all received glitchy pop-ups in our spam folder, it’s important to get it right when using emails and avoid making crucial marketing mistakes. If you’re a business owner or solopreneur and are confused by the process, then here’s some email marketing essentials for small businesses to help get you started.
Why is email marketing important?
It may appear like this type of marketing is just simply sending out emails to customers and expecting profitable relationships with your customers. But there’s much more to it than that. You’ll know this having probably received the clickbait email from other companies. However, when used effectively, email marketing can help build up a loyal customer base, which in turn, can boost your business income. A successful email marketing campaign involves finding a balance between adding subscribers, knowing what they want to see by communicating with them, and then analysing the results of how they responded.
Where to start?
Getting customers to trust your business takes time so starting an email list from the beginning of your launch is a good idea. Primarily, the best way to start is to create a sign-up box on your website. However, remember not to have an intrusive box as it’s likely to detract from reading the rest of your website. It’s also beneficial to use double opt-in sign up forms. This is where subscribers will receive a confirmation email after they’ve sent you their email address. The next step is to send a welcome email which should set out your ethos. This is one of the most important emails as it is the benchmark for your future relationship with customers. Plus, they also have the highest email open rates so have proven to be a top-performing campaign.
One of the most common strategies is to us a Call-to-Action (CTA) on your site in order to encourage people to sign up. This could involve offering something valuable. For example, an ebook, promotion or a discount. Additionally, use email campaigns to keep subscribers informed about your business, products/services, announcements and latest reviews or blog posts.
Types of emails
Now that you’ve captured subscribers, it’s time to think about what kind of emails you should send. This will obviously depend on your business and your target audience. You want customers to open the email! So, plan a strategy carefully and base them on some of the following examples:
- Weekly or monthly newsletter
- Promotional emails
- Personalised emails for loyal customers
- Seasonal emails
- Quizzes, surveys or polls
Once you have determined a clear aim of a campaign, you can shape the content and design around it. This should include the subject line, CTAs and images.
Schedule and Track your Email List
Being consistent with your email marketing is vital so set up automated emails to send out to your customers. It’s also a time saver too. What days and times to send email will depend on your target audience. Therefore, a good idea is to experiment to see what works more effectively. When you’ve sent emails out, track analytics to see how well your campaigns are performing, and then to look at areas of improvement. Analytics can be used, for example, as a way of seeing exactly which one of your customers opened which email.
How to Get Up and Running with Email Marketing
First, you need to decide on the email marketing tools you want to use, most of which relies on automation software. This has the great advantage of grouping your customers based on their engagement, sending personalised messages and automate multiple emails. However, you’ll need to do your research and compare different email marketing tools that are out there so you can work out which service is the best for your business. This comparison will also depend on pricing plans and features offered. If you’re not sure what to do, there are plenty of short courses to help you. Alternatively, hire a freelancer from platforms such as Fiverr.
While email marketing is a sure bet for generating sales, you always need to continue getting more email subscribers. Therefore, don’t forget to engage with other social media marketing to keep promoting your business and catapulting it to success!
