Email marketing for small businesses: 7 essential steps for success.
It can be hard to think of email marketing ideas for small businesses – even though we all know how important email marketing is in the digital marketplace.
What is email marketing?
And how can it help your business?
Well, whichever of the many email platforms you use to do it, email marketing is a way for small business owners to communicate with their customers/clients electronically. It can be used in a number of ways to help you to reach your business objectives.
For example:
- Sending an email to strengthen the relationship between you and your customers.
- Encouraging existing customers to remain loyal with loyalty schemes or thank you rewards.
- Sending offers to potential customers to tempt them into looking at and buying your products.
- Distributing useful and informative content as part of a content marketing campaign.
- Affiliate marketing through others’ email newsletters.
- Sending a survey or questionnaire to fill in post-purchase or site visit.
The advantages of email marketing for a small business.
We want to share our email marketing ideas for small businesses because we know how great the advantages can be. For small businesses on a budget, email marketing represents a low-cost means to campaign on a large scale. Emails can cost just a few pence each to mail out - around 4p, to be precise!
There are many benefits of email marketing. One of these advantages is the ability to collect data that will allow you to personalise your offers to your customers. Using email as part of your digital marketing strategy, you can reach a significant amount of people in a short space of time and monitor which customers click on links, shop, social media channels and even abandon their online shopping carts. With this information, you can remind them of products they were looking at and even offer an additional incentive to encourage them to buy.
One of the best reasons to use email marketing is that, compared to other forms of marketing, email is both cost-effective and gets some of the best results. Through email marketing, you can quickly learn what your customers like and dislike so you can offer the products and services that will actually make you money.
What can you do to ensure your email marketing campaign is successful?
If you want to deliver successful email campaigns, you need to ensure your email marketing ideas are suitable for your small business. There are many ways to make email marketing effective on a budget.
Collect email addresses where you can.
Your subscribers' database is key to the success of your campaign. Make sure to collect a customer's email address effectively. They should always know what they are signing up for and give permission for you to email them, as per UK GDPR regulations.
It's easy to collect subscribers from your website or social media pages using free giveaways and competitions.
We've got loads of marketing tips to help with this. If you'd like some help, contact us here.
Make your emails creative.
The last thing you want is for your emails to be considered spam. The more interesting and engaging your content, the less likely it is that you’ll end up in your audience’s junk folders. What's more, high open rates keep the risk of being flagged as spam much lower.
Design your emails in a way that they are visually appealing with copy that also packs a punch. Your subject line needs to get the email opened and your first sentence must be powerful enough to make your recipient keep reading. Ketchup’s expert creative copywriters can help with this.
Target the right people.
When you've grown your database, try to personalise your emails for a better response and higher open rates. If your products don’t apply to your email list, you’re not going to get sales! For example, you can target previous customers as one group, or perhaps send a follow-up email to all the contacts you made at a networking event?
The great thing about small business email marketing is how specific and targeted your campaigns can be. This is why one of our top marketing tips for small business owners is to create target audiences for individual email marketing campaigns.
Craft a subject line that draws attention.
Make your subject lines interesting enough that the people receiving the emails want to open them. Stay away from the generic! The best email asks a question in the subject line to grab attention and stoke curiosity.
Think about this: Why should your customers respond to your email?
Insert something inside the email that makes them want to shop. Place multiple calls to action throughout the email. Remember, the easier you can make it for the reader to respond, the better.
Know your customers.
It’s no good sending out an email at 3am to a customer's email address knowing they will be asleep.
Do your research and find out what days and times are best for sending emails. Think about when they’re most likely to buy and what kinds of subject lines are most likely to catch their eye in a busy inbox.
Research suggests that Tuesday and Wednesday are the most effective days to send to get the most engagement from your email list - but you need to use trial and error to find out what works best for your business email marketing.
Make it easy to engage.
When you add links to your emails, make sure they are direct links to the products, services, or information you’re promoting. If a customer is interested in seeing the product but lands straight on your homepage and has to find it for themselves, you risk the chance of them leaving instead.
Include buttons and well-written calls to action to make it as easy as possible for your customers to take you up on offers or follow your lead.
Tracking results.
Always track results so you can see who has opened the email and who has engaged with the content - ie. visited your website. Emailing software allows you to see which website pages have been visited from your emails. These insights make it much easier for targeted follow-ups to be made and ultimately conversions.
Let Ketchup manage your email marketing campaigns.
At Ketchup Marketing, we understand the benefits of email and manage multiple campaigns each month, including for large retail brands such as SimplyBe. We regularly run local campaigns for small businesses too, like Stamford Stone, Fusion Electrics Ltd and Rocket Exhibition Services and continue to support many other clients with their email campaigns, often achieving results over and above their expectations.