In today’s modern era, most of the technological advancements have changed the world of marketing. Although there are tons of digital marketing options available to choose from, most of the businesses prefer email to gain a lot from their marketing efforts. Regardless of industry and business size, email marketing can help you foster better customer relationships.
For small businesses, email marketing is a great channel to create more brand awareness, build trust, and, ultimately, drive revenue. But most of the small businesses considering social media as their primary source for communicating with their targeted audience. Despite the growth in the use of social media apps, over 90% of adults in the U.S. use email. According to the recent surveys, the number of email users are growing yearly as shown in the following figure.
Whether you run a small business website, an ecommerce store, or a blog, email is a powerful digital marketing tool for attracting and converting new customers, as well as retaining existing ones. Here are few small business email marketing strategies you need to employ to make your campaigns stand out:
Each and every business has its own email marketing goals. Factors such as size of the business, industry, budget and email marketing experience will influence your goals. For example, if you’ve just recently launched your product or service, your target might be to raise awareness and get as many sign-ups as possible. If you’re an experienced email marketer associated with a well-known business, your goal may be to maximize your return on investment.
Hence, it is highly recommended for small businesses to set goals before you start with email marketing as this will influence all future steps. It is also the only way you can truly track success of your email marketing campaigns in terms of ROI and conversions.
Define Your Target Audience
The next step is to build a buyer profile and narrow down the characteristics of the people you’re trying to reach. Later you need to get to know more about your ideal audience to roll out email marketing campaigns at the people who are most likely to buy your products and services.
Build A Quality Email List
Before sending out emails, you must gather contact data. For that you need to build a list of targeted contacts. Building a quality email list is the primary step in developing a successful email marketing campaign. However, building email list may takes some time but quality is always more important than quantity.
Here are the few steps to follow when you start building your email list:
- Keep email signup forms on your website
- Add signup forms to various social media pages
- Include a call to action (CTAs) in your email signatures
- Also, ask your website visitors to subscribe for your newsletters
Make sure to have compelling text that explains what users will get in return for signing up. Make the signup process as simple as possible by offering attractive rewards.
Decide Which Emails To Send
After growing your list of contacts, you can start planning the types of emails to send to your subscribers. The emails you choose will depend on the type of business you’re running. Although there are several types of emails you can send to your contact list, but promotional emails are a great way to alert your readers about current sales and special offers.
In addition to that, sending email newsletters is a safe method of establishing a connection with your targeted prospects. Newsletter provide valuable information to your prospects and they find it useful. Here are few types of emails – you can send to your targeted prospects:
- Promotional emails for special offers
- Seasonal messages (for holidays and for special events)
- Loyalty programs for dedicated customers
- Transactional emails such as eCommerce receipts and appointment notifications
Create Valuable Content
It’s important to provide content that’s relevant to your audience. Do some initial research to assess what your target audience wants and what you can offer. Respond to queries and provide useful information that people would really want to learn. There are many resources available to assist you in drafting an effective email, ranging from templates to writing tools.
Consider segmenting your audience into specific groups. Use various attributes like demographics, engagement, and past purchase behavior. With this information, you can customize content and increase email open rates. Also, be sure to include a clear CTA that relates to applies to the subject of your email.
Create The Design For Your Emails
While launching email marketing campaigns, you need to think about email design that aligns with your product and services. It is highly recommended to use pre-built templates that are tailored for different types of emails and industries.
When thinking about your email design, make sure to add a very clear call-to-action (CTA) button that aligns to your offer in the email and describes readers what you want them to do. Whatever you’re promoting, make sure you have a clear CTA for the readers. If you’re not sure about what are the best practices for CTAs, look for some call to action examples to get inspiration.
Track Results
Once you’ve started sending emails, you’ll need to keep track of them, evaluate the data, and tweak your strategy to get better results. It’s important to analyze email marketing data to gain success. It’s the only way to figure out what works and what doesn’t, so you can stop spending time on strategies that don’t work and instead put your efforts where they’ll have the most impact.
Your email marketing service will provide you with this information, which will help you take advantage of a variety of email marketing opportunities in your industry. Only make sure you’re tracking and acting on the right email metrics.
Bottom Line
For today’s marketers, email marketing is still the preferred channel. It enables small businesses to reach a broad target audience at a low cost and with ease. Follow the above-mentioned small business email marketing strategies to create an effective marketing campaign. Follow best practices like testing your messages, sending only to people on your list, and offering options for customers to join and unsubscribe with ease.
We at Data Marketers Group can help your small business to develop a beneficial email marketing strategy by providing an accurate b2b email list. For more information, contact our sales team today.