Email Marketing Strategies for Small Business.

Email is still a great way for a small business to stay top-of-mind with their clients, and with their prospects.

If you want to know what to do to have a successful email campaign, read on!

With email marketing, you can reach your customers where they are, without spending a lot of money.

Email marketing is all about expectations, and it’s up to you to set them.

If your call to action is clear and strong, and your follow-up is consistent, then you can count on a positive campaign.

However, if you promise to send one email per week and instead send them daily, then you’re setting yourself up for failure.

On the contrary, if someone is expecting daily updates or critical product updates and you don’t’ deliver, then they are just as likely to be annoyed

The first follow-up email is crucial to the success of your email marketing efforts.

Almost all email service providers give you the option to create an autoresponder, and it’s important that you take advantage of it.

The initial follow-up email should be sent immediately, include an introduction of your business and details as to what you plan on doing with your new subscriber’s email address.

Make sure it’s clear and to the point, addressing what you promised when they first saw your request to sign up. Then it’s simply a matter of living up to their expectations.

There are many reasons for using email marketing.

Making a sale, boosting traffic to your website, growing your social media following, staying top-of-mind with current and future customers.

Here are 5 simple things you can do to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns right now:

  1. Keep your sender field consistent and make it easy for your reader to see who the email is from. This is the first thing that readers look at when deciding whether to open your email or not.
  2. Be original when writing your subject line. Keep it short,  snappy and memorable. Speak to your reader’s fears, needs, desires, doubts or ambitions.
  3. Provide value. What your reader wants is the answer to a problem. When you provide value, your emails get read.
  4. Make your Call-To-Action/Links obviously. You want your reader to click through to an article? Then make sure the buttons or hyperlinks standout. Put your main call to action near the top.
  5. Make your emails mobile-optimized. Around two-thirds of email is opened on a smartphone or tablet. If your email doesn’t look great and function flawlessly on mobile devices, you might be alienating more than 60% of your audience.

Though they are all important, the 3 most important metrics are the open rate, click through rate (CTR), and unsubscribes.

Your open rate will tell you how well you’ve built your relationship.

If the open number is low, it means that people have started to delete upon receiving your email without opening it, which means you need to work harder on providing value and/or managing expectations.

If your CTR is low, it means that your message is either not targeted enough, or simply not getting through. In this case, focus on improving your copy.

If your unsubscription rate is high in relation to your opt-in rate, then you’ve passed the point of building value and writing good copy…you’ve got some serious work to do.

If this is you, try to examine when people are leaving and take action based on those leaks.

If they’re leaving after a certain autoresponder email, then re-work it. If they’re leaving after marketing messages, then re-work the way you present offers.

If they’re leaving early on in your funnel, then you need to fix your original call to action so that it’s in harmony with what you’re sending.

Email analytics are critical.

If you’re paying attention, they’ll give you very specific clues as to what you’re doing wrong. Of course, the key variable here is “paying attention.”

A few small business email marketing tips:

  • Send content they want to read and that is of interest to your audience.
  • Consider segmenting your email lists so the right type of message reaches the right target audience.
  • Make sure its mobile responsive. If it doesn’t display properly on their mobile device, they’re not going to read it.
  • Keep your emails short and easy to read.

Some small business email marketing facts:

  • 72% of U.S. adults say they prefer companies to communicate with them via email.
  • 91% say they’d like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with.
  • 73% of companies agree email marketing is a core part of their business efforts.
  • 25% rate email as their top channel in terms of return on investment.

Email marketing doesn’t need to be tricky.

Email remains one of the best marketing techniques for reaching out to your audience, staying top-of-mind and letting your readers know you are an expert in your industry.