Email Marketing: The Definitive Guide for Small Businesses

Email marketing offers huge potential to businesses of all sizes, and it can be a golden tool to developing the customer base and customer loyalty for small businesses. As soon as you build an engaged list of contacts you can start reaping the rewards of email marking.

Deemed one of the most effective forms of marketing, email marketing can connect your brand with potential customers, spread exciting business news, and promote sales –all with affordable or free tools!

Benefits of Email Marketing for Small Business
How to Start Your Email Marketing Campaign
Top Tips for a Great Email Marketing Campaign

Benefits of Small Business Email Marketing

There are plenty of rewards available to a well-constructed email marketing campaign. With 59% of people reporting that marketing emails influenced their purchase decisions, there is a huge potential for unlocking new sales and increasing revenue. From sending targeted emails to people who have bought from your business before, to drawing new customers in with a friendly welcome email, there are many ways of accessing the benefits of email marketing.

For small businesses, email marketing is a particularly effective tool as you can demonstrate your unique business personality and build brand awareness by landing in people’s inbox. Potential prospects and loyal customers love to feel connected to your business, and an email newsletter is a perfect way to reach out to these people and make them feel valued.

I would recommend email marketing as an essential part of a small business’s marketing strategy. As an affordable and effective marketing channel, email marketing can land you real results for relatively low investment. If you build the perfect email marketing campaign here are just some of the benefits you could be seeing:

How to Start Your Email Marketing Campaign

1. Start Building Your Contact List

Contacts are everything when it comes to business, and this is also true for building your email marketing campaign. When setting up your email strategy, you need to build an initial contact base.

Consider who you already know who would be willing to sign-up to your business email –industry contacts, business partners, previous clients, friends, and family are all great places to start. Reach out to these contacts with your email sign-up and encourage them to join as an initial bank of contacts.

From here, you need to create a sign-up form which sells your email newsletter and spread your contact search. Add the sign-up form to your website, social media, industry social media pages, forums, and anywhere you think would drive engagement to get people clicking.

Make sure your sign-up form is clear, exciting, and accessible. You want to make it as easy as possible for potential prospects to add their contacts –don’t let a long-winded form or complicated design get in the way of you connecting with your audience. And of course, remember to include full GDPR guidelines and compliance for data protection.

2. Build An Email Content Plan

Whilst you’re building out your contact list you need to be thinking ahead to that kind of email content you want to be delivered. Planning is key when it comes to delivering valuable email content as you need to have a cohesive style and message throughout.

Be mindful to map out any key events, sales or holidays which could boost engagement with your business and be sure to target these in your content development.

Alongside one-off events, you need to build a consistent brand structure and plan for your email campaign. Monthly round-ups or news drops are a fantastic example of implementing structure into your email campaign. Give people something to look forward to every month, a constant hook to your business so you’re at the forefront of their mind.

3. Create A Design Template

Next comes the creative bit -creating a design template for your email campaigns. You want to ensure that the look and feel of your email matches the content of your brand message. Keep the design simple, but striking, to grasp readers’ attention but ensure the content is readable.

Inject your brand’s personality and branding into the e-page, with brand colours, icons and logos to enhance your message. Consider using a unique font style linked to your businesses so every aspect of your newsletter can be associated with your brand.

Remember that your email campaign is landing in people’s inbox for a reason, and you want to drive them to your website or social pages. With this in mind, include clear and inviting call to actions (CTAs) into your design to drive readers to your business pages.

4. Understand Your Audience

Creating email campaigns that are tailored to specific interests are more likely to engage your readership and encourage people to click on your email.

Consider breaking your email list into groups with common interests or needs, this way you can channel particular messages to these people to get a high response rate.

Once you’ve developed your email lists, you can create email campaigns that resonate with that audience to drive your email engagement.

5. Analyse the Campaign Performance for Future Improvements

After you’ve hit ‘send’ and your message has landed into people’s inbox, now the real work needs to start. To increase engagement and see the results of email marketing, you need to reflect on what people are engaging with and the aspects of your email campaign which are driving results.

Head to your email marketing provider site and check the analytics or insights page for a review of the data collected from your email marketing campaign. The main stats to review will be the number of emails opened and, of those, how many people clicked your CTA buttons.

Understanding the in-depth ins and outs of email marketing data can be tricky, so if you’re looking to improve your email marketing campaign get in touch with our experts at Absolute Digital Media to boost your marketing results.

Top Tips for a Great Email Marketing Campaign

Quality Over Quantity

No one wants to have their inbox spammed with multiple emails a week. Delivering high quality, relevant and inspiring email content is the main aim –give your audience something they want to click on and read.

To avoid email over-kill, keep your sending rate to 1 email a week, at most; including an additional monthly round-up or newsletter to support your weekly content.

Make Your Emails Mobile Friendly

In our digital generation, 61.9% of all emails are opened and read on mobile devices. If your email campaign isn’t optimised for mobile use you’ve just lost a huge chunk of your readership and your click-through rate will plummet.

Make sure your emails are responsive and usable on mobile devices to ensure you are getting the most out of your campaign.

Set up Automated Emails

‘Thank you for your purchase’ emails and welcome emails for new subscribers can be set up for automatic response and send to your clients and new sign-ups. Not only will this ease your workload but, an automatic email response makes customers feel valued in your businesses and drive your business value.

Personalise your Emails

Personalised emailed deliver 6 times higher transaction rates –that’s a big area for potential growth! As well as building your group lists to target certain messages, you can also include code which adds your reader’s name into the content of your email. This is a great way of giving an easy, personal touch to encourage people to click and read your email.

Don’t underestimate Subject Lines

A witty, pun-centered, discount selling or intriguing subject line could be the difference between a potential prospect clicking to read your email or not. A subject line is the first thing your audience will see, so don’t ignore its potential.

Brainstormexciting and interesting subject lines so you have a strong line for selling the content of your email –the email which will, in turn, lead customers to your business. The subject line is the crucial start of the trail to lead new customers to your product or service.

For more information, and to build a bespoke email marketing campaign, get in touch with myself or an expert at Absolute Digital Media on 0800 088 6000, today.