Establishing a strong communication with your target audience through their preferred channel can help your organization forge long-lasting business relations. 72% of consumers prefer email to be the primary channel for communication and interaction with a brand.
Remarkably, 64% of small businesses utilize email campaigns to reach out to their customers. This is where email marketing for small businesses comes into play for delivering positive turnaround experiences for their prospects and clientele. Through email marketing, small businesses have been able to effectively promote their brands, generate leads, and increase their sales revenue.
Left clueless about how your email marketing can hit the bullseye for your audience? We’ve got you covered through our blog, which aims to brush up on strategies, best practices, benefits, and tools for successful email marketing. Without a further ado, let’s get this rolling, but to begin with, first…
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a targeted marketing strategy of forwarding business resources to connect with potential prospects, generate brand awareness, boost customer loyalty, and drive sales.
Email marketing can empower the small businesses to educate and nurture their target audience through the lead funnel process. Moreover, it also enlightens the potential clients, shares updates, broadcasts announcements, conducts polls, surveys, and more.
According to each dollar spent. All in all, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective channels for small businesses compared to other promotional channels.
Let us further understand the benefits that email marketing brings to the small business:
Benefits of Email Marketing For Small Business
Email marketing is a pick of choice for small businesses to connect with their audience and promote their services directly into the inbox of their target audience.
Have a glance at a few of the benefits small businesses would reap using email marketing:
1. Establish Brand Authority
Small business leaders consistently strive to establish their brand as an expert in their industry. Email marketing helps you portray your niche expertise and domain authority through highly valuable marketing content that sparks the interest of your target subscribers.
2. Lead Generation & Nurturing
Small businesses can reach out to potential prospects through email marketing, targeting those who are interested in acquiring their services. This captures the details of leads and helps the business nurture those using inbound marketing techniques. It also helps the sales team connect with qualified sales leads and guide them through the conversion funnel.
3. Sales and Conversion
Endorsing your business through email marketing can help small businesses unite with their audience by offering exclusive offers, details, and other valuable insights. It entices prospects to make the ultimate financial decision to obtain your services, resulting in maximum conversion and sales.
4. Better Customer Retention
Email marketing is a powerful technique for staying in touch with your client base and nurturing your target audience to become your future clients. By providing informative and engaging content, small businesses can foster loyalty, encouraging their clients to return and reduce the customer churn rate.
Strategies to Boost Your Email Marketing For Small Business
Small businesses must develop a goal-oriented email marketing strategy before launching their email marketing campaigns. It helps the leaders to understand the needs of their audience and develop a futuristic vision for upgrading their service offerings.
Here are some of the vital steps you should follow:
1. Define Your Email Marketing Goals
Every organization’s needs are subject to change based on their objectives and business goals. Similarly, the initiatives and tactics behind their email marketing campaigns would also vary. Based on the desired growth objective, set your business goals and targets based on your potential, such as:
Who are we sending the emails to?
This would ensure that your marketing efforts behind the email campaigns are pushed toward the interested audiences. Developing a deeper understanding of your subscribers, such as their region, age, behavior patterns, and more, can help you modify your email campaigns to their preferences.
What actions should the email recipients take?
This would help you identify the right call-to-action (CTA) for your email campaigns.
What would your audience benefit?
It’s simple, what would your email subscribers receive after taking the desired action? This would make it easier to formulate the right marketing resources that align with the objective of your email campaigns.
Also, emphasize your type of email marketing goals and your small business’s desire to achieve brand awareness, sales conversion, lead generation, customer engagement, retention, and more.
2. Filter out Your Audience
To execute a top-notch email marketing campaign, businesses must have a complete understanding of their audience. This helps you channel your email marketing to the ideal profiles of prospects who can utilize or benefit from your services. Your business can identify the ideal profiles of customers by answering the following questions, including:
- What are the pain points of my audience?
- Which demographics do I intend to target?
- What is the age group of my target audience?
- How can I effectively showcase my unique selling points (USPs) to my target audience?
Small companies can consider conducting online surveys, using market intelligence tools, and performing online interviews to gather the insights that can help them narrow down on their ideal target audience.
3. Select the Types of Emails with a Touch of Personalization
Small businesses should pre-select the types of emails that can entice their audience while developing their email marketing strategies. Marketers can utilize a range of email options, including promotional emails, transactional emails, newsletters, survey emails, and offer emails, to forward their marketing resources.
With a touch of personalization in their emails, small businesses can establish a deep business relationship with their prospects. consumers do business with companies that use personalization.
Usually, small businesses fire up their email marketing campaigns with a welcome email series, as “Welcome” emails have the highest open rate of 82%. The email series is followed up by newsletters and whitepapers that are forwarded once or twice to stay relevant and up-to-date with their audience, pushing them through email marketing funnels.
Want to Learn on the Effective Ways for Developing Your Email Marketing Funnel for Conversion?
Marketers can strategically incorporate promotional emails, product updates, exclusive offers, and deals into their marketing strategy on a periodic basis. Furthermore, you can deliver guides, playbooks, free calculators, templates, how-to videos, webinar invitations and links, and more.
4. Elegantly Develop Your Email Marketing Elements
Many organizations and marketers have a conflicting approach, whether the email content or the design is crucial in email marketing. Indeed, both are crucial to making your email marketing campaigns perform better.
Develop a balance of professional design filled with attractive elements and interesting content that can persuade your target audience to take the desired actions.
Based on the displayed response, marketers can introduce different experiments into their email marketing campaigns to drive higher engagement and boost the conversion rate. Organizations can creatively engage their target audience through subject lines, videos, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, email content, and email headers.
5. Perform A/B testing
A/B testing is pivotal for optimizing the performance of your email marketing campaigns. Small businesses can identify the elements that align with the needs of the prospects and stir their interest to engage further. Through two different email variations, small companies can accurately select the best-performing elements from their marketing content and visual elements.
Companies can utilize A/B testing to their advantage, modifying marketing resources precisely according to the needs of their audience and existing clients. Components from the email marketing campaigns that can be modified are your email design, call-to-action buttons & their positioning, subject lines, email content, and visual appearance.
Top Mistakes to Avoid In Email Marketing To Small Business
Email marketing is a cost-effective channel for connecting with your audience. Emails have been termed as the third-most influential source of B2B decision-makers. Making a blunder here would cost your small business exponentially.
Here are certain email marketing mistakes that email marketers must avoid:
Adding Irrelevant Subject Line
Small businesses aiming to target potential prospects must have a to-the-point subject line. It determines whether the recipient will open your email or mark it as spam, depending on the targeted audience.
Anything that is lengthy, unprofessional, or overhyped emails are forwarded to the trash. Emphasize the inclusion of concise and relevant subject lines for better performance.
Avoid Unsolicited Words in Your Emails
Using spammy words in your email marketing, such as ‘act now,’ ‘expiring soon,’ ‘limited time only,’ can be detrimental. Including them in your email campaigns can certainly result in your email being sent to the spam folder.
Try to use language in your emails that ensure they do not appear excessively promotional. Stick to a professional tone and avoid over-exaggerating business information.
Emails Not Optimized For Mobile
81% of the users prefer to read emails on their mobile devices, thus making mobile optimization a vital element of email marketing. Since a majority of users check email through their mobile devices, it is essential for small businesses to ensure their emails are compatible with these devices.
Emphasize your attention on including a responsive design; opt for a single-column layout and straightforward subject lines.
Inadequate Email Personalization
72% of the consumer prefer to engage with personalized messaging in their emails. The higher the personalization, the better the click-through rates. Small businesses can personalize their emails by incorporating the recipient’s name in the body or subject line. Further, try different tactics to pique their interest and foster a connection with your establishment.
Best Practices for Upgrading Your Email Marketing For Small Business
In this fast-paced industry, small businesses are constantly under pressure to capture the attention of their prospects through their creative marketing resources.
Check out some of the best practices that can support your small business to elevate email marketing performance:
1. Mobile Optimize your Emails
81% of the users prefer to access emails on their smartphones. This makes it essential for small businesses to customize their emails to be mobile-friendly. Run several tests on sample emails to ensure the emails align with the mobile device. This leads to better engagement and higher reach with an overall possibility of better conversion. Companies that design mobile-responsive emails increase mobile clicks by 15%.
Utilize mobile emulators built into your email marketing software to preview your email on various device types. This ensures your emails are well-aligned according to the device and also look appealing.
2. Research and Curate Compelling Subject Lines
As a small-sized business, you must utilize the opportunity to grab the attention of the readers from the word go! As 64% of users decide to open emails based on the subject lines. With an eye-catching subject line, businesses can capture their audience’s attention while also encouraging them to click and explore the value-based services they offer. 69% of the email recipients report emails as spam after glancing at the subject line. Some of the interesting email subject lines are: (subjective to change as per the industry)
- “Top 10 ERP solutions to boost your business productivity”
- “Knock Knock, it’s the best email service provider”
- “Attention! Limited Spots Available for Exclusive Webinar”
The primary intention of the email is to capture the attention of users through action verbs and encourage them to click to learn about the resources you are offering.
Discover Advanced Tactics to Craft Effective Subject Lines for Higher Email Open Rates!
3. Adhere To the Privacy Regulations
Small businesses, while discharging their email marketing, must ensure compliance with privacy regulations. This includes the CAN-SPAM Act, GDPR, CCPA, and other relevant regulations. This would provide authorization for forwarding commercial emails to your targeted prospects and existing subscribers.
Failing to adhere to these privacy regulations can result in substantial financial penalties, reputational damage, and multiple lawsuits.
Here are some of the overviews of the CAN-SPAM privacy regulations:
- Avoid deceptive subject lines
- Respect the opt-out requests
- Avoid false or any misleading information and details in the header
- Include the sender’s latest physical postal address and more.
4. Promote Your Customer Testimonials to Stand Out
Businesses can showcase customer testimonials in their email marketing campaigns to win the trust of their audience. 72% of the customers find businesses trustworthy if it has more positive user testimonials. This would enable small businesses to establish long-term relationships with potential prospects and convert them into clients, thereby boosting sales.
- Small businesses can showcase short product/service reviews
- Tap into the user-generated content and have them advocate for promoting your small business to your audience.
- Small companies can forward video testimonials to educate their target audience and build credibility.
- You can share customer stories and case studies, as they can trigger emotions and put out their tangible results
5. Build Your Own Email List
Building your opt-in email list is the healthy way to ace your email marketing performance. Businesses must keep a check on the spam and privacy regulations of their targeted demographics.
Some of the following ways you can develop your email database are:
- Capitalize the email sign-up forms by handing over informative lead magnets.
- Host social media contests to offer value-driven resources to make the leads sign up and obtain their email addresses.
- Provide the sign-up call for the attendees from the tradeshow and B2B events.
- Share the newsletter with the clients, and so on.
Businesses can also acquire email marketing services from top-rated vendors as an alternative. This would help you save your manual efforts for gathering, verifying, and updating their email database on a regular basis.
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Analyze Your Email Marketing Metrics
Check out the important email marketing metrics that can help your small business measure its performance:
1. Spam Rate
The spam complaint rate must range around 0.1%
Spam rate is the metrics that highlight the total irrelevant emails marked as spam by the recipients. It is a vital assessing metric which displays the performance and deliverance of the emails.
2. Click-through Rate (CTR)
2.6% is a healthy range of a performing email marketing campaign
The click-through rate is a metric that measures the effectiveness of the email campaigns by analyzing the percentage of the viewers and the total clicks that were made. It highlights the effectiveness of the marketing resources.
3. Email Open Rate
Must range between 15-20%
The email open rate is the percentage of emails that are opened out of the total number of emails delivered. It is also used to analyze the engagement and overall performance of the email list.
4. Email Conversation Rate
Ideal to scale between 2% – 5%
Email conversion rates serve as the performance yardstick that defines the impact of your email campaigns and the total number of people who took action after engaging with the informative resources.
5. Unsubscribe Email Rate
Must be below 0.5%
The unsubscribe email rate measures the total percentage of email subscribers who have chosen to opt out due to various factors or based on their interest selections.
Factors to Look Out For In the Email Service Provider
Selecting the right email service provider (ESP) can help you accelerate your performance as your needs grow. We’ve jotted some of the key factors as a small business must consider before selecting their email service provider:
- Ease of use – ensure that the platform is user-friendly, or it would require several hours of hassle to launch your campaigns.
- Data security & regulation – carefully prospect, and look out for data storage and encryption of your email marketing software. Additionally, emphasize that it aligns with the GDPR, CCPA, and CAN-SPAM to avoid any potential legal complications.
- Email Marketing Potential – Check if the ESP software solution can automate sequences, bulk campaigns, and other transactional emails.
- Analytics and performance reporting – can it deliver accurate data insights, such as lead conversions, click-through rates, open rates, ROI, and more?
- Targeted segmentation – emphasize the delivery of your ESP when sending different emails to a range of prospects and clients that suit their interests and requirements.
- Seamless connectivity – Can the email marketing software get along with the other business tools, such as analytics, e-commerce platforms, and even CRM systems?
- Price Plan – Small businesses must conduct a thorough comparison of email marketing service providers, considering their specific business goals and needs. Opt for a viable solution that covers all your email marketing requirements and falls under the allocated budget.
Best Email Marketing Tools for Small Business
Email marketing tools can enhance an organization’s performance by targeting a wide range of business leaders from diverse demographics.
Here are some of the top-rated email marketing tools for small businesses:
1. Brevo
- Pricing – starts at $9 per month
- Free plan /trial – yes
Features –
- Email automation and workflows
- Unlimited contact storage
- CRM and SMS marketing
- Landing page builder
- Facebook ads integration and more.
Brevo, previously known as Sendinblue, is an excellent email software solution for small businesses, offering a balanced combination of free trials and professional plans at a competitive price range.
2. HubSpot
- Pricing – $15 per month
- Free plan/ Trial – Yes
Features –
- A/B testing
- Free tools for small businesses
- Performance analytics
- Automation & drip campaigns
- CRM integration and more
HubSpot is a go-to email service provider for small-sized establishments. With its cloud-based services, companies can gain complete control in analyzing sales pipelines through its integrated services.
4. Campaigner
- Price plan- $59 per month
- Free Plan/trial – 30-day free trial
Features –
- SMS automation builder
- 900+ email templates
- A/B testing & conversion tracking
- Geolocation & content targeting
Campaigners allows its users to manage multiple email campaigns simultaneously, engaging their clients, promoting their brand, and retaining their audience. Businesses can function and connect with their prospects through personalized segmentation and automated workflows.
5. ActiveCampaigns
- Price Plan – $39 per month
- Free trial – 14-day trial
Features-
- Inbuilt spam tester
- Automation workflows
- Predictive content
- SMS campaigns
- Email and marketing automation
ActiveCampaign is a cloud-integrated platform that optimally performs email marketing, CRM, and ad automation to boost business performance by streamlining marketing, personalizing customer experiences, and enhancing sales performance.
6. Zoho Campaigns
- Price Plan – varies based on the opted plan (Standard & Professionals)
- Free trial – 14-day free trial
Features –
- Email template builder
- Drog-and-drop workflows
- Drip email marketing
- Reports and analytics
- Email automation
Zoho Campaigns is an integrated email marketing software that supports small businesses with a broad range of features to execute email marketing campaigns.
7. Omnisend
- Price Plan – $16 per month
- Free plan/trial – Yes
Feature –
- Performance analytics
- ecommerce automation
- SMS and web push notifications
- A/B testing
- Segmentation and reporting
Omniscend is a high performing marketing automation platform that has uplifted the performance of the small scale businesses through its cost-effective, user friendly email marketing services.
In Summary
Email marketing has become the go-to channel for small businesses to promote their brand and services due to its effectiveness and ease of accessibility. Almost 99% of email users check their email every day. This presents a great opportunity for small businesses to approach their target audience with valuable resources about their products or services, and also nurture their existing clientele.
We cover the important aspects that you must consider when developing your email marketing strategies, as well as best practices that can enhance your performance. By following the shared insights as a small business, you can excel in your email marketing campaigns to achieve your business goals with focused efforts.