February 9th, 2021 | Updated on June 7th, 2023
Nowadays, there are a lot of digital marketing options available for browsing. Most small businesses focus entirely on social media channels, rather than email marketing, as a primary medium for interacting with their audience, and obviously, this is a mistake. This implies that small businesses are losing lot of opportunities to acquire more prospective customers.
Over 90% of US adults use email. Despite the development of social messaging apps, more than 74% of young people use email.
As is apparent, small businesses remain to acquire a ton of email marketing. No matter who your customers are or where they live. They work or play; they probably have an email account from where you can contact them.
Whether you maintain a small business website, an ecommerce store. Or then a blog again. Email is a unique digital marketing tool that will help you attract and convert new customers .
Read on to find out how you can use this channel to boost your small business growth in 2021.
Why Is Email An Effective Marketing Tool For Small Businesses?
There are many reasons why email is a particularly powerful tool for small businesses. It can help you build attention to your image, expand your customer base, build customer trust and retention, build your industry skills, and ultimately grow your revenue.
How about investigating the various benefits of using email marketing for your small business:
- Get Significant Profitability: Email marketing provides reliable and financially intelligent methods for correspondence between brands and customers. Estimations show that this type of marketing has a fantastic quantifiable profit, which is more than twice as much as any other marketing channel can bring.
- Improve Customer Retention: Email allows you to build better customer relationships through constant engagement. This type of communication encourages you to reach customers where they go every day: their email box, which would be difficult to do using another marketing channel.
- Build Your Authority: Your goal as an entrepreneur is to become an expert in your domain where customers go to find solutions to their problems. Email marketing will help you set yourself up as an authority by sending informative content that your subscribers find useful.
- Increase Conversion And Sales: Email helps businesses generate tons in retail business each year. It offers ample opportunities for businesses to reap profit from impulse buying. For example, you can use it to tempt customers to buy by sending exceptional offers/discounts for items related to their past purchase.
- Develop Your Brand: With a unique email marketing strategy, you as a small business will build your brand. You will have a direct access to your subscribers’ inboxes. And you can simply send relevant and well-curated emails based on their previous purchases, and this will give you an edge over your competitors.
- Find Your Customers’ Needs: Email makes you familiar with what your customers likes or dislikes, so you can keep up with their requirements. You can segment your customers based on their preferences and send targeted and personalized mail that resonates with them.
- Helps Understand What Works: This type of marketing gives you an approach to finding out what works and what doesn’t by testing and tracking different measurements, such as email opening rates, browsing rates, and earnings.
To take advantage of these great benefits, you need to understand how to do email marketing correctly, and follow the best email marketing practices.
Start With An Email Marketing Plan
It will help if you design your email strategy before starting a campaign. To do this properly, there are a few steps you should take:
Step 1: Set Your Email Marketing Goals
Each company will have various goals in terms of sending crusades by email. There are a lot of components that can influence and influence your dreams, for example,
- Your spending plan
- Your email marketing experience
- The business you are in
- How your marketing channels focus
Your goals can be general. For example, building brand attention or maybe more quantifiable and based on the number.
Step 2: Define Your Audience
Your next step is to create a buyer persona and focus on the specific qualities of the people you want to reach out.
Like all other marketing channels, don’t try to follow everyone.
It helps if you get familiarized with your right audience to focus on your email marketing efforts to the people who are more interested in buying your products and services.
Step 3: Build Your Email Contacts List
Before sending emails, you should collect contacts to send emails to. Since you already have your marketing goals in place and defined your audience, you can start collecting emails.
Here are the initial steps to follow when you start building your email list:
- Place email signup forms on your site.
- Add signup forms to your social media pages
- Include a Call-to-Action in your email, and in other places, you can ask individuals to subscribe.
The work you have done in the last two steps will help you substantially collecting emails of targeted audience.
Your sign up form is the first step to getting new email subscribers, and it can make or break a visitor’s decision to receive your emails.
Make sure you incorporate compelling content highlighting values and offers your subscribers will receive in exchange for signing up. You must offer attractive incentives and make the signup process as simple as possible.
Step 4: Decide Which Emails To Send
Since you are actually growing your contacts list, you can start planning the types of emails to send to your subscribers.
As we discussed earlier, the emails you choose will be based on the kind of small business you run. Most businesses start with a short welcome note and then send out a newsletter once a twice a month to keep the consistent engagement with their subscribers.
You can also decide to add occasional promotional and product updates emails, and so on.
Step 5: Design And Create Your Emails.
Many marketers wonder if your email design is important and if is there any worth investing money and time to ensure that your message looks eye catching.
While some argue that the goal and content of a message are more meaningful and that a simple email is better, others go in favor of emails that contain a lot of rich media content.
Whatever you choose, put an idea in place to ensure that your emails reflect your brand image and resonate with your target interest group.
Step 6: Track The Results
Once you start sending emails, you need to track results, break down information, and rejig your strategy to improve your results.
Breaking down email marketing information is essential to making progress. It’s the best way to understand what works and what doesn’t, so you can stop wasting efforts on strategies that don’t work and, instead, focus your efforts where you will get the best ROI.
You Can Watch:
- How many people opened your emails?
- Who opened the email?
- What did they click on?
- Who dropped your emails?
This information is quickly accessible from your email marketing service you are using, and it can help you get the most out of many email marketing opportunities in your industry. Simply make sure you monitor the right email metrics and tweak your strategy and design based on gleaned information.
Email Strategies To Pump Up The Growth
What types of email marketing strategies should you implement in 2021?
With fast- changing technologies and techniques, connecting with leads and customers changes as well. It’s good to rejig your email marketing strategy as per the latest trends, but figuring out new strategies can be a challenging and daunting task.
For the convenience of the small business, we have listed 7 strategies that your business can leverage to engage your current users and subscribers, and grow even further.
Keep these in mind while implementing your email marketing strategy:
1. Get The Right Email Frequency
Email frequency matters – a lot. Send your marketing emails regularly to ensure that your customers and subscribers remember your business. No matter what type of email you send, use it as such a “delicate update” so that when your supporters need an answer from your business, your name is the first to ring.
You should not send too many emails. But sending too few emails brings its own, different set off problems.
It’s essential to have a frequent email campaigns that encourage you to stay alive in your customers’ memories; however, don’t overdo it and just not irritate your subscribers.
Whichever type of email you’re sending, use it as a sort of “gentle reminder” so that when your subscribers need a solution, your name is the first one that comes to mind.
2. Create Catchy Email Subject Lines
The subject line which email recipients see when they receive an email in their inbox. Since email inboxes are flooded with hundreds of emails per day, you as a small business need to make sure your message stands out, and catchy email subject lines are more important than ever.
Spending a little extra time to craft catchy email subject lines will help you boost email open rates, avoid the spam folder, and get your message in front of the right audience.
3. Be Precise
Brevity is essential when creating emails for your marketing efforts. You should respect the busy routine of your customers.
Long emails have appeared asking for lower opening rates, so keep your emails straight, so you don’t lose supporters.
Highlight only the main concerns and get them to participate in the email using list items, subheadings—besides, keywords to get the instant attention of the readers.
4. Personalize Your Email Messages
It would help if you segmentize your audience so that you can send customized messages that seems relevant to each segment of your audience.
Give your emails a personalized touch, and you’ll get higher open and engagement rates. It gives you a chance to send useful and relevant content to subscribers and connect with them on a personal level. As per one study, email personalization drives 6x higher transaction rates.
For example, you can add the customer’s name and other relevant information, which will help you get their attention.
5. Use The Image Alt Tags
Of course, some email clients do not display images. This is why it is important to use other image tags whenever you can. You can consider this such a “reinforcement text” that gives users specific settings regarding your images’ content.
This is also significant descriptions of the images in your emails to visually impaired subscribers who use screen readers.
6. Make Your Emails Mobile-Friendly
Most people read their emails on mobile phones, so it’s imperative to make sure every email is mobile-friendly.
You should test your emails on significant mobile phones. Most email software services have mobile emulators that allow you to see what the email will look like on different devices, so there is no excuse to send a badly optimized.
7. Embed Social Media Profiles
Leverage your email marketing efforts to double your subscribers’ engagement by adding your social media profiles with Call-to-Action, asking users to follow you on different social platforms as well.
Most email providers offer you the option to easily promote your social media profiles in your emails.
Synopsis
Don’t miss out on all the great benefits of email marketing. Get these email marketing strategies up and running right away so you can expand your customer engagement, help you with transactions, and grow your business.
