3 Email Marketing Tips For Small Business Success

Email marketing is an important tool in your digital marketing toolkit. It’s a great way to remind your customers about the great things your business is doing and it’s also an effective tool for generating sales.

However, it’s easy to become overwhelmed or disengaged with your business’s email marketing efforts if you don’t see the results you want. Maybe you spend too much time writing emails and find that you have few subscribers even opening them. Or perhaps you’ve tried to send your email list all different types of marketing emails without seeing sales come through.

Fortunately, there are strategies you can use to get better results from your email marketing. Here are three email marketing tips that can help to improve your campaigns.

Write Engaging Emails Subscribers Want to Open

The success of your company’s email marketing campaigns largely depends on your open rate. Do your email subscribers actually open and read your emails? If you use an email service provider such as MailChimp or AWeber, you can find the open rate for all of the different emails that you’ve sent. If you’re still looking for an email marketing solution check out our blog post on the 7 best tools available.

One of the challenging things businesses face is getting people to actually open their emails. And, if your inbox is anything like mine, that’s understandable. Nowadays our inboxes are flooded with emails — some valuable, and some not so much. There are a few steps you can take to ensure that yours are seen as valuable to your subscribers:

1. Use a recognizable sender name. We recommend sending your emails out from a representative of the company. People like to feel like they’re getting something personalized and if you’re an expert in your field, they’ll be happy to read what you have to say.

2. Write engaging subject lines. Your subject line should be catered to your audience. While you want to make the subject line exciting, avoid subject lines that are spammy or misleading. This might cause the email to end up in a spam folder or cause your customers to unsubscribe.

Good subject lines are descriptive, benefit-based, curiosity-based, and/or personal. You want readers to know what to expect from the email and you need to deliver content that your customers want. If your customers want discounts, lead with the fact that your email contains an exclusive coupon that they’ll want to take advantage of. They’ll surely open the email then.

3. Write emails that your subscribers want to read. Not all customers want the same thing, so you’ll need to closely consider your ideal customer profile (also known as a “customer avatar”) to determine what content to include. What problems do they face and what are they looking for? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, your email marketing campaigns aren’t likely to be read.

Invest in Automated Email Marketing

Customers respond best to personalized and consistent email marketing efforts. As your business grows, it will become more difficult to send each customer an email to commemorate certain occasions and to keep in touch.

Invest the time and other resources required to utilize automated email marketing solutions to benefit your business. You can write autoresponders that go out on a set schedule. One email could thank them on the day that a person signs up, while other emails could go out a few days, weeks, or months later on a schedule that will keep that person engaged.

Depending on what information you collect about your customers, you might be able to take your automated email marketing campaigns even further. For instance, you can automatically send out birthday wishes and coupons if you collect your customers’ birthdays. Or you could set up an email marketing trigger to send an email once your customer becomes inactive for more than three months to try to get them to become more active again.

Offer a Mix of Promotions and Great Content

With email marketing campaigns, it’s ideal to offer a mix of promotions and great content that your audience wants to read. If you only send out promotional offers (and no content), customers may unsubscribe because your campaigns feel like a constant sales pitch.

On the other hand, if you only offer content-based emails without a promotion, you may be missing valuable opportunities to generate sales using your email marketing campaigns. It’s important to vary your content to meet your readers’ needs and interests and to make sure you hit your goals.

I recommend creating a set schedule for your email newsletter. For example, you may send out a weekly newsletter every Monday that contains content that’s relevant to your business. Then, twice per month on a Wednesday you send out a special deal you’re running. This way, people come to expect to receive your emails and they will consider you reliable for sticking to a schedule.