Many small businesses use email marketing as it is a popular and cost effective way for small business owners to consistently engage with past, current and prospective customers, but a huge chunk of business owners are not harnessing this marketing medium properly. If done well, it can be very effective.
If you already engage in email marketing, here are some tips to making email marketing work for your business. If you haven’t tried it yet, keep this information in mind to help guide you through the process.
Whether you are trying to increase click through rates (CTR) to your website or ecommerce store, increase your email open rates or boost the number of times an email is shared, there are some things to keep in mind to help you improve your approach.
Tips to making Email Marketing Work Effectively In Your Business
Deliver one clear message. Have a single focus. For instance, focus on one topic and avoid ambiguity in your email content. Having too many focuses or too much information often gets ignored and is not as effective in grabbing people’s attention.
Small Business tips for better email marketing
- Share a clear reason why subscribers should click your ‘call to action’ for instance, click on your or ‘web link’, or ‘subscribe’, or click your ‘buy now’ button.
- Don’t make your emails too long, as most people just scan for key pieces of information.
- Cut out words that may trigger spam filters, particularly in the subject line, such as, ‘free’, or ‘you are a winner’ etc. Avoid overusing exclamation marks.
- Be consistent, establish a set time and day to deliver your emails. It could be weekly, monthly, quarterly or whatever time you think works best for your audience. Try and schedule your emails so that you are consistent.
- Make your emails mobile responsive. This is such a popular medium for readers nowadays. Make sure you are not missing opportunities by not investing in making your content mobile friendly.
- Keep subject lines short and communicate something of value.
- Ensure your target audience can still read your e-mail without having to download graphics.
- Keep your copy simple and professional and focus on the benefits to the customer.
- Make sure it is easy for people to unsubscribe (opt out) of receiving your emails.
- Segment your email lists so that your messages are more relevant and targeted to your specific clients. For example, if you have a sale on women’s cosmetics, it is less effective sending a blanket email to your entire list. If you segment your list to females within a certain age range, then your email will be more effective. You can also segment by geographic region, or job title, or by buyer behaviour, depending on the sort of data that you capture about your customers.
- Track response rates and metrics from email campaigns so that you can obtain insights into buyer behaviour and refine campaigns.
- Add links to your images, so that readers can click through to your website or store via images.
- Add social sharing buttons like Facebook. LinkedIn and Twitter to promote social sharing.
Finally make sure you preview and test your emails before sending. Do all of the links and buttons work correctly? Have email addresses and web addresses been spelt correctly? What about phone numbers? Consider split testing your emails to determine which one will perform best. Finally ensure that everything is in order before sending.
Don’t forget to track your results so that you can measure the impact of your efforts.