When owning a small business, you'll be looking for ways to cut costs, especially when it comes to promoting goods and services that you’ve got.

Now, you’ll find a lot of articles telling you about many different ways to go about your marketing strategies. They’ll tell you about all the kinds of tools you can use. But one that stands out is email marketing. 

The process of marketing through emails is like a hidden gem. It’s not expected to work, but you’ll be surprised by the results it can have. 

But why?

A simple reason is that it offers a high return on the investments you put into it. With email marketing, small businesses are given ways to make their content more personal, and this helps build lasting relationships with their customers.

For small businesses, email marketing offers a direct way to send messages to their customers. It allows these businesses to work on community building while offering promotions, all without needing a large budget.

As you read on, you’ll see more about email marketing and all you’ve got to know to get it to work. You’ll come across its benefits and how you can optimize your campaigns to ensure success. Let’s start!

The Basics Behind Email Marketing

Before jumping into building and executing your strategies, knowing the full background of email marketing plays a crucial role in business growth.

What is Email Marketing?

Simply put, think of it like personally reaching out to your customers. Email marketing refers to how companies send extremely personalized and targeted emails to a set list of subscribers. 

These emails can serve a bunch of purposes. This includes promoting products, building relations, or encouraging customers to take certain actions. The actions include either making purchases or signing up for events.

Unlike social media, your messages aren’t going to end up lost in an endless feed. When you target your customers through email marketing, it’ll go nowhere apart from their inbox; a place that’s always checked and can never be ignored.

This makes emails a useful platform to send messages to your customers.

The Different Kinds of Email Campaigns

Every email that’s sent out isn’t the same. Here are different emails usually sent by a small business:

• Newsletters: Many businesses send regular updates that provide industry insights and useful company news. This keeps customers interested and updated with all the latest company info.
• Promotional Emails: Emails designed to generate sales by giving special discounts and unique deals. This builds customer loyalty and a community where customers feel appreciated through exclusive deals.
• Transactional Emails: Automatic emails sent when a customer completes a specific action. Includes emails like order confirmations or product shipping updates.
• Drip Campaigns: It consists of a bunch of pre-written emails that are sent over time. Follows a drip-like scheduling method which is meant to guide customers toward making a purchase.
• Incomplete Purchase Emails: It is sent directly to users who did not finish their purchase and encourages customers to return to your website/app to complete their purchases.

Each type of email sent out has a different purpose. Picking the right type of email for your marketing plan depends on the services and products your brand offers. 

Why Marketing Through Emails is Essential For Small Businesses

Some businesses tend to ignore the true power of email marketing and we don’t blame them. The whole process looks outdated. 

But the truth is, that email marketing is a very useful way to reach customers.

Here’s why:

Cheap Alternative

Marketing your products and services can cost a lot depending on the marketing route chosen. But email marketing is incredibly cheap. Unlike paid ads or traditional media services, sending emails isn’t going to cost a lot.

Many platforms offer free plans for businesses. This makes email marketing an extremely accessible marketing strategy.

Direct and Personalized Communication

Unlike marketing your products traditionally or through social media, emails cannot be ignored by your potential and existing customers. 

Moreover, these emails can be personalized using a customer’s name or past purchases. In turn, this makes the experience very relevant to the customer, which boosts the likelihood of them returning.

Building Customer Loyalty and Trust

Even for businesses, regular communication is what helps build trust, and it’s no shock that customers feel more validated when a brand they know about is personally reaching out to them.

When users receive valuable content from your business, they’re more keen to stay engaged with what goes on.

Increased Sales and Conversions

A strategically timed email can push unsure users toward completing purchases. With well crafted CTAs and targeted promos, email marketing can boost your sales efficiently.

Brand Awareness and Retention

Consistently appearing in your customers’ inboxes keeps your brand fresh in their minds. This means that when users need specific services also offered by you, your brand will come to mind first.

Automation and Scalability

Email marketing gets rid of the extra manual labour needed to personalize content. Using this strategy, you can automate the different kinds of emails to save time and ensure consistent communication.

Setting Up Your Email Marketing Campaign

Choosing The Right Email Marketing Platform

To start off your email marketing campaign, you’ve got to find a platform to use. Here are the popular ones:

• Mailchimp --- It offers free plans and automatic features and is very easy to follow.
• Brevo --- It includes email and SMS marketing and allows customer reach through multiple channels.
• Constant Contact --- It is best for beginners and the easiest to use, allowing businesses to set up their strategies without needing technical skills.

Building Your Email List

Now that you’ve got a platform to use, you need customers to send the emails out to.

Here’s how to build your subscriber lists:

1. Using Sign Up Forms: Most businesses make use of forms placed on websites or social media. These allow existing and potential customers to sign up to receive emails.
2. Offer Incentives: Many businesses leverage email marketing groups to offer exclusive discounts and deals. Tempt your customers to subscribe to your newsletters, etc.
3. Segmenting Your Lists: When you’re building a subscriber list, you’ve got to separate different kinds of customers. Segment subscribers based on their interests, location, or purchase histories to target customers better.
4. Maintain a Clean List: Super large subscriber lists can be difficult to deal with. Clean the lists occasionally to remove inactive and incorrect email addresses.

What to Send in Your Emails

The info that you’re going to be including in your emails is basically going to make or break your strategy.  This decides whether your customer is going to skip past or read through your emails.

But how are your emails different from other businesses?

Design Effective Emails

A good email design can make all the difference. 

• Make your emails something that’s nice to look at. Anything that you put in your emails has to be easily understandable.
• Designing your emails for phones is also a must. Ensuring emails look good on a mobile phone ensures that you get more customers to read through the emails. Give it a thought! Don’t you go through your emails mostly on your phone?
• Always remember to add effective CTAs. Sometimes, all your customers need is a little encouragement to make that purchase.

Writing an Eye-Catching Subject Line

The subject line is what your customer’s eyes first fall on, and it doesn’t matter if they’re opening your emails or ignoring them. 

When deciding how to write your subject lines, it’s crucial to make them strong and direct. Do you have an exclusive offer? Let it be known immediately!

Your subject line should create curiosity without sending your customers astray, and it’s even better when you can add personal touches.

In your attempts to write something interesting, it’s very easy to end up with a subject line that looks incredibly spammy. Always remember to not overdo your excitement in the emails. 

Essentially, you’ll want to hype up your products and services without making it look like you’re spamming your customers.

What to Include in Your Email’s Body

Once the email is opened, it’s got to be interesting enough to keep your viewer’s attention. The best way is by sticking to a conversational tone. This helps build a link to your subscribers.

Using different storytelling techniques can make your emails sound more relatable and keep them more memorable. Consider breaking the information down into small chunks so that your reader doesn’t get bored of a huge block paragraph. 

Just like how we’re doing it!

Your emails need to come with a strong CTA. You need to really convince your customers that they have got to go back and complete that purchase. This can be done by sticking to phrases like “Shop Now” or “Claim Your Offer.”

Scheduling and Sending Your Emails

Sending your emails at the right time plays an important role in deciding if your campaign’s doing well. 

Sending too many too quickly can overwhelm your customers. Similarly, sending one once every few months means that your customers aren’t going to remember who you are and what you offer.

So, being in that middle ground should be your goal.

Picking the right moment to send emails entirely depends on your audience. But if you’re sticking to the general trends, you’ll want to send out your emails on any of the working days. 

Additionally, you’d also want to send out your emails during working hours. No one’s going to be checking emails they’ve received after they’re done working.

That being said, experimenting with your email sending habits can help determine what’s the best time to stick to.

The number of emails you’re sending out is also key. For newsletters, companies usually stick to sending out one or two a week. On the other hand, promo emails are sent out whenever there’s a big sale or during seasonal promo times. 

But then you’ve also got transactional emails. These are sent directly after a customer completes their purchase. For abandoned carts emails, these are always sent a few hours after the customer has left items in their cart.

Measuring How Well Your Email Marketing Campaign Is Going

Following your email campaigns is necessary to know if your efforts are paying off. There are plenty of metrics brands keep track of to measure performance.

Open rates indicate the group of customers that open your emails. Simply put, you don’t want low open rates. Low open rates are usually because your subject line isn’t interesting enough or maybe you’re just targeting the wrong people.

Companies also keep track of click-through rates. This refers to the group of people who end up opening your emails and then clicking on links inside of that email. This helps give an idea of how engaging your content is.

The most useful indicator you’ll see is the conversion rate. In the end, you prefer people to buy the products you sell, and the conversion rate will tell you if that’s happening or not.

Brands also tend to keep track of bounce rates. Bounced emails are those that never end up going out to customers because of faulty or outdated email addresses. Keeping track of this helps identify which accounts to get rid of when cleaning your subscriber lists.

Keeping an eye on these metrics allows businesses to work on their email campaigns. It provides the results of different strategies and whether their future campaigns need to be optimized.

The Bottom Line

Email marketing is a super cheap yet highly effective way for small businesses to connect with their customers. By crafting proper and targeted emails, businesses can create meaningful relations with their audiences.

But email marketing success doesn’t come from sending out random emails.

Email marketing only works if it involves proper planning and continuous refinement. Experimenting with different subject lines and editing the email body are all important parts of creating a winning strategy.

When done right, email marketing can significantly boost your traffic and conversions. With the right balance between strategy and execution, small businesses can expand their reach and engage their audiences. 

So get to implementing these strategies to try out the success of email marketing for your business!