Smart Email Marketing Strategies for Small Business Owners

Email marketing has been one of the oldest ways businesses have used to get high-quality leads. And the amazing thing about them is that they still work today!

Of course, you can't use the same methods for email marketing that worked back then and expect it to produce results today.

But when it comes to getting in touch with the right customers through email marketing, we can give you a leg up!

With that said, let's take you through important email marketing tips that you should know.

Here are 12 Must-Know Email Marketing Tips Every Small Business Needs

1. Build a Quality Email List

Everything starts with an email list and this is also where a lot of businesses go wrong. An email list is simply a list of email addresses that a business collects of people who show interest in their services.

These naturally accrue over time and mostly with tools like opt-in forms and others. However, the problem arises when they take shortcuts and buy email lists.

Buying email lists will never have the same impact as the ones collected normally. Some might even argue that buying email lists can be counterproductive, and we agree with them!

Many hurdles prevent you from building a quality email list. This includes low opt-in rates and high bounce rates on the website. Poor content framework and execution are usually the issue here.

2. Segment Your Audience

A mistake that many marketers make with their email campaigns is improper audience segmentation. Not having separate email funnels for different demographics is an issue.

When there is a lack of segmentation, you're going to end up sending generic emails to your email list, and that is something that you don't want to do.

Not splitting your audience into buckets can result in low open rates and wasted effort.

On the other hand, over-segmentation is also an issue and it makes your email marketing more complex than it needs to be.

Use your client purchase database to sort their preferences into separate categories. Break up the segments further into age and behavior for a more granular view.

Doing this can also help you automate emails to these customers.

3. Create Compelling Subject Lines

The one aspect that can make or break email strategies is the choice of subject line.

While it might seem like we're making a big deal out of it, subject lines are pivotal when it comes to getting customers to click on an email.

If a subject line is too long or vague, people are more likely to click and drag it into their trash! Another issue with subject lines these days is clickbaiting.

While it does work the first few times, clickbaiting leaves the audience with a bad taste in their mouth. And eventually, they'll just consign your emails to the spam folder.

The key is to keep it short and succinct, the ideal length is about 50 characters or less. While using emojis are good, don't spam them which can result in the opposite effect.

4. Work On Personalization

Imagine that you got a standard email with not even your name mentioned anywhere in the email. You'd most likely toss it even before you finish reading anything in it!

This is something that all businesses need to avoid. Sending generic emails does nobody any good apart from being sent to spam.

And the worst part is that if enough people report your email for spam, good luck trying to get into their inbox in the future.

The first step is to ensure that you've personalized content for each audience segment. It should have relevant product or service recommendations.

Don't ignore their past interactions with you, it makes your brand seem like they don't care. Have email campaign triggers in place that respond to user actions.

5. Keep Your Email Short and Simple

How many times have we heard the expression "Keep It Simple Stupid"?

Well, the surprising thing is that it is relevant for many aspects of marketing including SEO even today.

One such area is the email body. Cramming the email with as much text as possible will only end up frustrating the reader.

Take care that you don't overwhelm the reader with design motifs and colors in the email. Another mistake is brands don't have a proper hierarchy when sending out emails.

Ideally in emails, it should follow a "F" pattern to get the best results. This pattern works great for text-heavy pages.

Optimize your images so they don't slow down loading. Ensure that you use proper bullet points and white space to make it easier to read.

6. Use a Strong Call-To-Action

A pivotal part of email marketing is getting people interested enough to follow the CTA. And therein lies the problem with a majority of the low-performing email marketing methods.

Their CTA section is too weak or vague to get users to take action. This could be anything from poor-quality text on the CTA to bad button visibility.

It should also be noted that brands need to show urgency in their messaging and that is directly proportional to the success of the CTA.

Enticing them with time-limited discounts and giveaways is a great way to encourage them to click your CTA.

When building a list of CTAs, ensure that you have action-oriented words. Get Now, Show Here, and Get Started are a few good examples of this.

7. Create an Engaging Narrative

Reading an email from a brand should never feel boring. Unfortunately, many email campaigns focus on the sales part of it while leaving out the more engaging parts of the brand.

An email should focus on the storytelling aspect of a product or service to be successful. Paragraphs of boring sales-heavy text will not be interesting to your clients.

The email should elicit an emotional response from the user and build a relationship.

Also, an email that is too formal or looks AI-generated is not going to perform well, especially when competitors are sending out more creative pitches.

Remember, you need to keep the email customer-centric to get them to be interested. Sharing a few testimonials and success stories is a good way to build some trust.

8. Test Your Email Campaign

Regardless of the size of email campaigns you build for your business, you must test them.

Not A/B testing your campaigns can have a detrimental effect on your campaign performance in the real world.

Pay attention to spam score checks because they can help you figure out if an email provider is going to classify your email as spam.

While testing, also ensure that you focus on mobile previews. Most of your customers are going to check your email through their mobile devices.

While sending out emails or scheduling them, ensure that you're doing that at a time when most of your recipients are active.

Getting an email from your business in the middle of the night won't work because it will be buried by a pile of other emails by morning.

9. Automate Email Campaigns

The key to effective long-term email marketing is automation. Sending out each email manually can take time and wastes valuable effort.

The best option would be to carefully create automation tasks to get more out of your email process. Not having a welcome or abandoned cart email sent to your customers is not optimal.

Another area where automation can help is following up with your customers based on the time passed or actions they've taken.

Having an email campaign that can work on re-engagement is a bonus and that can be made much easier with automation.

Work on improving your welcome and engagement email sequences through automation. On the flip side, over-automation can lose your personal touch with your clients, so keep that in mind as well.

10. Keep Track of Important KPIs

With email marketing, as with all marketing, there are a bunch of KPIs that you need to pay attention to.

If your email campaign isn't tracking open rates and ignoring click-through rates, you might need to work on that.

It is also important to have conversion tracking implemented so you know exactly how many recipients are taking the right action versus people who are not.

The email campaign should also notify you of the number of people unsubscribing from your email list or not clicking your CTAs.

All these together can give you a much more complete picture of your campaign progress.

Have mechanisms in place that can monitor opens, clicks, heatmaps, and other parameters in your email. Build a detailed report and compare it to your competitors or against industry benchmarks.

11. Adhere to All Regulations

Email marketing is a great way to get more leads to your business but it is open to a lot more scrutiny from regulatory bodies.

GDPR (EU Law) and CAN-SPAM Act (U.S. Law) are the most commonly followed regulations concerning electronic communication.

According to laws from these bodies, your email should always have consent from the user before you send them emails.

Another thing to keep in mind is to always have an unsubscribe option available and visible in your email.

If not, users can sometimes categorize your emails as spam which can be disastrous for your business email. Also, never hide sender information when you're contacting potential leads.

Many email providers will classify this as spam and even if it goes through, people are not going to trust you.

12. Continuously Test and Improve

Once you've got everything in place, remember that the process doesn't end. Like all other types of marketing, email evolves.

If you don't have any optimization methods for your campaign, eventually it will drop in performance. The strategies that are performed today will become outdated later.

Ensure that you do your research and stay ahead of trends in the market. Run regular competitor analysis and pit their email campaigns against yours to improve.

Have a feedback collection process where recipients can send you feedback that you can use. Read about and understand the various tools for emails that are available today.

Mailchimp, Ninja Outreach, and Omnisend are great for improving your campaign productivity and performance.

Summary

● Build a natural email list based on your opt-ins and other inbound processes - avoid opting for bought contacts.

● Carry out proper audience segmentation to improve all email metrics.

● Work on proper subject lines that are genuine and not clickbait while remaining engaging.

● Personalize every email that you send out keeping in mind various customer profiles.

● Keep emails short and readable ensuring that there's enough whitespace between text.

● Track and record all types of email KPIs including open rates and conversions.

● A/B tests every part of your email campaign from subject lines to sending schedules.