5 Steps to Running a Successful Email Marketing Campaign for Small Business
Every form of marketing has its upside and downside. But as a small business, you need to utilize the upside over the downside and reap the best possible dividend. The same can be said about email marketing campaigns as well, especially if it is for your small businesses.
There is a lot of competition these days in email marketing, but that should not dampen your spirits. If there is still any marketing technique that can give you a higher success rate than even social media, it is undoubtedly email marketing.
Over 90% of people check their emails daily, and it is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing techniques around and absolutely perfect for small businesses.
Email marketing is much more than what you perhaps think it to be. It’s not just about sending a few emails and communicating with your existing clients, but it’s also about establishing a bond between your brand and your future clients and customers.
In this blog post, I will be giving you five priceless email marketing tips that can boost your sales graph and make it shoot through the roof. But the best part is, even small businesses can benefit a lot from these email marketing tips.
So, let’s get started.
Verify Your Email List
First of all, truth be told, email marketing is a process that requires hard work, and that’s the reason a lot of small businesses are not willing to pay much attention or effort to this fantastic yet cost-effective marketing technique.
In their negligence, they often overlook a very important step in the whole email marketing game: email list verification.
Verifying the email list will surely help your small business in the long run. At first, it may seem to be a tedious task to verify each email individually, but later it will reduce the time you need to put on other tasks down the line.
While you verify the emails, do check whether the targeted customer is active or not. This way, you will be able to determine whether you will get some sort of return from the recipient customer when you send the email.
It is often seen that many businesses complain about wasting a lot of time and effort only to see that the campaign has bounced back because the targeted customer was inactive or the inbox was full. This happens when you don’t spend time running the email verification process.
The verification process can help you sanitize the email addresses and help you get rid of silly spelling or typing errors (for example, clientemail@gail.com instead of clientemail@gmail.com).
So, if you are just starting off with email marketing for your small business, you need to make it a habit to verify the email list once in a while and keep it updated, active, and fresh.
It will automatically promote a higher email open rate, increase engagement, and reduce the number of unsent emails. All of this will only lead to a better sales graph for your small business.
Know Your Audience
For any business to make its digital marketing campaigns successful, knowing the audience is pivotal. This is all the more important when you are doing email marketing.
If you are a startup or small biz, it would be your learning phase as most of it will be guesswork. However, larger brands should be aware of who their audiences are and their preferences.
But this should not suffocate the spirit of any startup founder because; the moment you send your first email campaign, you will be able to collect data about your subscribers. From next time onward, you will have real data in your hand to work upon.
Apart from that, you can use various digital marketing tools to know more about your targeted audiences. For example, you can collect user data from Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc., and use them wisely for email marketing.
Both these tools, and many others like them, will give you helpful piece of information, like customers’ demographics, locations, and their interests. That’s not all; you will have other metrics as well, which will help you better understand your customer base and get valuable insights into their needs and preferences.
This, indeed, can be a very good starting point to develop an effective email marketing campaign strategy for your small business.
Craft Killer Email Copies
Content is “The KING” in digital marketing!
You already knew it. Right?
But do you know that it can make a great deal of difference for your small business email marketing as well?
Well, the copy that you are going to use in your email to sway and hook your customers can make or break your impression in their eyes. This is why the content of your emails should be top-notch.
Even if you come up with multi-layered email marketing campaigns, if they fail to leave a mark, your customers won’t take long to click the unsubscribe button.
Always remember that being relevant is the key to success. So, make sure the content never fails to strike the right chord with your audience.
You can also keep a tab on the kind of content that proved to have resonated best with your audience. This will make them open your emails and engage with your products every time you send them one. Only killer content will compel them to do so and boost your revenue constantly.
On the other hand, if you notice a gradual nosedive in your email click-through rates, you need to understand that, for some reason, your audience is not engaging with your brand anymore.
This is when you need to go back to the whiteboard and re-evaluate the entire strategy, including the email content part.
Also, never hesitate to invest in hiring a good copywriter who can produce stellar email copies and collaborate with a full-stack digital marketing company that can take care of the entire email marketing process efficiently.
If you manage to build trust with your audience, and as a result, the email click-through rate increases, you will get a much better return from all that investments.
Make Use of Email Marketing Automation Techniques
Thanks to digital marketing advancements, we now have many different automation tools to execute our email marketing campaigns seamlessly.
However, the negative side of automation techniques from customers’ point of view is that the convenience factor has made them all the more impatient.
Therefore, you need to use the email automation features in your email marketing campaigns and cater to your customers’ requirements immediately, even if you are working remotely.
This will not only please them but also make the entire process easier for you to manage.
You can use the automated response feature to reply to their queries over email instantly. This way, the communication chain remains intact, and your customers stay satisfied.
Besides, you can also make use of the email automation feature to keep your audience aware of the new products and releases. You can reach out to them for their opinion and reviews about a product they have previously ordered.
Frankly, with the email marketing automation at your armory, the possibilities of a successful email marketing campaign are endless. You just have to tap into the right places and reap the best possible benefits for your small biz.
Do Email A/B testing
Lastly, you must do A/B testing for all your email marketing campaigns.
This is one of the most crucial steps for the success of the whole process. After all, experimenting with email campaign strategies, subject lines, copies, call to action, etc., matters a lot!
This is the best possible process to figure out which email campaign performs the best with your customers. When you have the right set of data from A/B testing, it will not only help you improve the email CTR but the conversion rates as well.
But how do you start?
First, you need to decide the aspect you wish to focus on. It can be anything, email open rates, click-through rates, or anything else. Now, you have to create two emails and name them ‘A’ and ‘B’. Needless to say, each of them will be different from the other to test which one is more effective.
Suppose, if you are testing for email open rates, the parameter that should be measured is the “email subject line” used in both emails. So, come up with two intriguing subject lines for two emails and see which one performs the best.
By tallying the end result of both the emails, you can settle for the best subject line to increase the email open rate. Simple! Isn’t it?
Final Thoughts on Running a Successful Email Marketing Campaign for Your Small Business
In today’s world, where social media is everywhere and dominating the whole scene, email marketing is still the top contender and indeed one of the most preferred online marketing methods for every kind of business, be it small, medium, or large.
This is simply because the process works, and what else do you want out of it!
It’s one of the most effective ways to connect with your audience and establish a long-lasting bond that will prove to be invaluable for your business, especially if you are a startup or a small business.
I believe the aforesaid small business email marketing tips will be beneficial for you. So, how is your experience with email marketing for your startup? Let us know in the comment section, as it will be helpful for millions of small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs out there.
Till then, happy email marketing.
