Email marketing has become an essential tool for brands looking to reach new leads and reach their target audience.
But this tactic isn’t just for big companies with big budgets.
In fact, email marketing is affordable and cost-effective, making it a great option for small businesses with limited marketing budgets.
However, before you start strategizing or designing campaigns, it’s important to understand how email marketing works.
Below we have put together a guide for beginners to small business email marketing who are looking for ways to develop this digital marketing strategy for their new or existing campaigns. In this post, why is Email Marketing Important? How does email marketing work? What are your habits? Let me explain what the costs are.
Why Email Marketing Is Important For Small Business?
First, we discuss how email marketing can be effective for small businesses.
While large companies can model different methods and spend money on different methods, most small businesses have limited budgets.
This means they have to focus on what is worthwhile and what will provide the best return on investment.
One of the great benefits of email marketing is its cost-effectiveness.
Whether you’re running your email marketing campaigns or hiring an email marketing agency to help you, email is one of the most affordable ways to reach the largest number of customers.
Affordable email marketing helps small businesses maximize their marketing budget and get more for their expenses by offering more qualified guidelines for less.
Another important advantage of email marketing for small businesses is its effectiveness.
Business It is important for small businesses to use their time, money and resources wisely.
Because email marketing allows businesses to target a specific audience with their strategic content and messages, it increases their chances of attracting qualified leads who are more likely to be interested in their products or services. Thus, the success of effective email marketing campaigns helps small businesses maximize time and resources while increasing return on investment.
Small Business Email Marketing Best Practices
Understanding how email marketing works is just the first step to creating an effective email marketing campaign.
You also want to stay updated with the most up-to-date practices to ensure that your campaigns are well received by your audience.
The following best practices will help you improve delivery and open rates as well as encourage engagement from customers:
- Define your email marketing goals.
- Segment your email lists into relevant groups.
- Take advantage of automated email workflows.
Define your email marketing goals:
Before you start designing and implementing marketing emails, you may want to start with some measurable goals.
What do you expect to achieve from your email marketing campaigns?
Based on your answer to this question, you can start developing key performance metrics (KPIs) to help you track the progress of your goals along the way.
Are you not sure where to start with your email marketing goals? Here are a few email marketing measurements and ROI goals you might start with:
- Improve Sales Conversions – Every business needs to improve its conversions. But how can we measure if our email marketing is helping?
There are a few different metrics that you can track to determine how effective your email marketing lead nurturing is, including lead acceleration, engagements and impact on revenue.
- Increase Website Traffic – This is another common goal for small business email marketing.
If you want to grow and improve awareness your brand, you need to get visitors to your site so that they can see what your company has to offer.
The best way to track this metric is by looking at click-through rates.
- Increase Revenue – This is a goal for most businesses. But how does this pertain to your email marketing strategy?
Well, once a person becomes a customer, you should be able to see how email marketing may have contributed to their conversion.
For instance, if they clicked on a link to make a purchase, then you will be able to see just how much revenue increased due to your marketing emails.
Segment your email lists into relevant groups:
Segmenting email lists is another best practice to help improve the results of your campaigns.
According to the DMA, 77% of email marketing ROI comes from segmented and targeted email lists.
This is because segmenting email lists helps your business provide more relevant content to your subscribers.
List segmentation involves separating your email contact list into different groups based on similar characteristics.
There are a few different ways that you can segment your email list for best results:
- Geography – If you know where your contacts live, you can use this information to segment your email list and deliver geographically relevant content.
For example, if your business is a clothing company that offers products that may depend on the terrain or the weather. You can use the geographic data to factor this into the promotions or content that you send through your email marketing.
- Customer Personas – Every small business should create buyer personalities, which are basically just generic profiles of your individual buyers.
Once you have created these personalities, you can sort your list according to which character each individual responds to. This allows you to tailor the content to the needs and behaviors of each type of specific customer.
- Company Info – B2B businesses can use information like job title, industry, or company size to segment their email marketing lists.
For example, companies from a certain industry will have different concerns or applications of your product or service.
By separating your lists into like groups, you can be sure to serve the right content to the right readers.
There are many other ways you can segment your email lists, such as interests, purchase frequency, past purchases, or engagement levels.
Choose a meaningful segmentation strategy for your business based on the information you collect from your email subscribers.
Take advantage of automated email workflows:
Once you start developing your email marketing strategy, you need to make sure how email marketing works when it comes to automation.
Automating email marketing not only saves time by automating the email process, but it often also results in higher conversions as it allows you to increase relevancy.
Before you start creating workflows, think about the path your customers typically take along the customer’s journey.
For example, many of your blog readers may download a postcard or e-book before contacting their sales team.
This is an example of a process for which you can create a workflow.
In that case, you can send an automatic message to an individual after subscribing to your blog.
This message could thank them for subscribing and direct them to some other places where they can find useful resources on your site.
Based on the content this person reads on your blog, you could put them on a segmented list based on their interests so that they get updates on topics that interest them.
Your workflow will also map and automate the text messages this person will receive based on their blog behavior.
For example, you could give them an automated message with additional suggested content based on their interests.
One week later, you can send a further message via CTA asking them to contact the seller.
In this example, you take the information you already know about your customers’ travel և use it to speed up the sales cycle through email marketing. By building automated workflows to deliver the right message և content at the right time, your business can feed the leaders without having to manually send messages.
How Email Marketing Works?
Once you understand why email marketing is important to small businesses and best practices, you are most likely ready to dive headfirst.
But first of all, let’s talk about how email marketing works from a logistics perspective.
Before you start sending out emails to your potential customers and contacts, it’s important to become familiar with the intricacies of email campaigns.
This will enable you to better develop an email marketing strategy that will help accelerate your sales cycle.
From the subject line to the CTA, there is a lot to consider when it comes to curing changing marketing emails.
To better understand how email marketing works, let’s look at a few different aspects of marketing emails:
- Subject Line
- Body Copy
- Design
- Call-to-Action
- Relevance
- Offer
- Landing Page
- Timing
Subject Line:
While the subject line may require the fewest copies, it is one of the most important components of your marketing email.
In fact, your subject line can make or break the letter.
You only have a few minutes to grab your audience’s attention with an interesting and relevant topic.
If the subject line isn’t interesting to your reader or seems irrelevant to them, chances are they won’t open it.
They may even go so far as to add you to their spam list, which can further impact your open rates.
Imagine you receive a bullshit or spam email. Or worse, a letter that has no subject at all.
Nobody would open such a letter. So, make your theme intriguing and noteworthy.
Take the time to develop a topic that is not only compelling but also clarifies what the email will be written about.
Make sure the reader knows through the subject line that what they are about to read will bring them some value – be it saving money or learning something new.
Body Copy:
In addition to the subject line, you should also carefully consider the content of the letter text.
Make sure to use language that matches your brand and reflects the rest of your digital marketing campaign’s content.
If you are a fan of using capital letters in your email content, forget about it. This is the digital equivalent of shouting, and your audience probably won’t want to be yelled at.
So instead of using all uppercase letters, try highlighting the word in a different way, such as italicizing or changing the font to larger and bolder letters.
The body of your email should also be short and clear. However, it is important that you communicate clearly about your brand value and offers.
It’s also very important that your content helps them navigate to a call to action that motivates them to take the next step.
Design:
The overall design of your email has a big impact on both readability and conversions. Design is more than just images in an email.
This also includes the colors you use and how you post the information you present.
Keep your email layout simple and straightforward, and also match the rest of your brand.
The color scheme should be appealing and consistent with your brand. It is generally best to use dark font colors on a light background, as this is the easiest to read.
Be careful with images as they can take time to load and can affect your mobile reading devices.
Another important thing to consider is whether your email design is mobile-responsive.
Many consumers read their emails from their mobile devices.
And if your emails aren’t mobile-friendly, some recipients won’t be able to open, read, or navigate your emails.
Call-to-Action:
A call to action, or CTA, helps drive the reader to the next stage of the conversion process.
Whether it’s filling out a form, uploading a snippet of content, or even contacting your company directly, it’s important that your call to action clearly tells the reader what you want them to do next.
Your CTA should not only be clear and direct but also motivated you to take action.
Use active verbs such as click, download, or call to let readers know what to do next. You can also highlight your call to action to make it visible.
Instead of a simple hyperlink, you can try using a CTA button that stands out and makes it easy to click and go to the next step.
When it comes to posting, the CTA usually comes at the end of the email content. However, you can also include the call to action earlier in the content.
This helps interested readers who already know what they want to take the next step in the buying journey.
Relevance:
Every email you send must relate to the person who receives it.
This is where targeting comes into play, and so is the essence of how email marketing works.
You should not send the same email to all members of your mailing list.
Instead, strategically design targeted content that matches the needs and objectives of each specific audience.
Segmenting email lists based on specific characteristics can help you increase open rates and thus increase conversions over time.
For example, if you sell sports equipment, you can segment your listings based on the interests of the sport of the person you are talking to.
Then develop offers and content specifically tailored to those interests. This helps to improve relevance and conversion.
Offer:
When consumers open your emails, they wonder what value your company has to offer.
This is why it is important to present an appropriate offer or encouragement in your emails that will encourage readers to open them, read the information it contains, and then take the desired action.
Whether you provide them with a free download of content, a promotional offer for a product or service, or even just useful information, you’ll get more respondents if your emails offer any appropriate incentive.
Be sure to include this incentive in your subject line to increase your open rate.
Landing Page:
If you want your email subscribers to turn into customers, you will need to develop a landing page that will help them move to the next stage of the conversion process.
Don’t rely on hyperlinks to your homepage or services page to get the job done.
This leaves readers wondering what the next step is.
Instead, tell your readers exactly what you want them to do next by designing a landing page that shows them how to take the next step.
The content on your landing page should be conversion-oriented, offering readers the information and motivation they need to make a purchase.
Timing:
Timing is also something you need to consider when designing your email marketing strategy.
You don’t want to send emails to your subscribers at times of the day when they are likely to be busy or asleep.
Besides the optimal sending times, you should also know what days or times of the month you send emails.
To optimize open rates, you should test and measure email send times to find what works best for your business.
You may find that some target segments prefer one frequency and time, while others prefer others.
The only way to find out is to check your emails and see what time the submissions are best opened.
Apart from these factors, you should also think about how you plan to integrate email marketing into your other digital marketing campaigns.
Marketing emails don’t work in a vacuum.
They should be used in conjunction with other tactics like social media or content marketing to create comprehensive campaigns.
A holistic approach to email marketing will help you get the most out of every campaign.
How can email support your social media efforts? How can this help you improve customer retention campaigns? As you create your digital marketing strategy, think carefully about how to incorporate marketing email messages to increase the effectiveness of your lead generation and development efforts.
The Costs Of Email Marketing
Now that you know the benefits of email marketing and how email marketing works in terms of logistics and best practices, it’s time to discuss the costs.
Email marketing comes with a relatively low cost, making it a great tactic for small businesses to use.
In fact, for every dollar spent on email marketing, the business typically brings in about $ 44.
However, there are a few different costs that you will need to consider before you begin implementing your email marketing campaigns:
- Email Marketing Automation Software – If you aren’t already using email marketing automation software to build and implement your campaigns, it’s time to start.
These types of programs allow you to use attractive and mobile-friendly templates, making it easy to create great-looking marketing emails in no time. - Supporting Staff – If you don’t have someone currently dedicated to email marketing then you will need to factor in the costs and time that it will take for someone on your team to manage your email marketing campaigns.
If you have to hire an additional staff member, this is another added expense. - Email Lists – The quality of your email list will also factor into the overall costs of email marketing.
If you have a quality, permission-based list, then you can start building and sending campaigns right away. However, if you don’t have a strong list of subscribers, then you’ll have to factor in the time and costs of building this list out. - Content and Creative – You’ll also want to factor in the costs of content and creativity. Whether you have team members who can handle this for you or you have to hire additional help. Your business will need someone who is experienced in writing email marketing content that converts.
- Working with Email Marketing Agency – Instead of hiring an additional staff member, you might consider partnering with an email marketing agency. Working with an email marketing expert can help you save money in the long run as they know just what it takes to create effective campaigns without the guesswork.