An effective email marketing strategy is an essential part of any business, no matter the size of your business. It’s a surefire way to help nurture and retain existing customers and generate new ones. Best of all, you don’t need a massive marketing budget to build an effective email marketing strategy.
Here are five ways to create an effective email marketing strategy.
Before you begin an email marketing strategy, learn how and why this will impact your business. Also, you must have confidence in its potential. Don’t just start sending out emails without buying into your own plan.
If you have any doubts, consider a relevant survey found most customers like getting promotional emails. A whopping 96% of people who earn $75,000 – $99,900 say they would like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with. Also, 92% of those earning $100,000 or more agree with this sentiment.
Email marketing is also a great way to reach customers on mobile devices. The most popular activity for mobile users (59%) is checking and sending emails. Email marketing is cost-effective, too. The average return of around $40 for every dollar spent.
You need an email list to reach your customers and target audience. You can collect these in a variety of ways:
When customers say they want to receive emails from your businesses, they’re saying they want to gain value. Be ready to address their common concerns:
If your customers are signing up in person, you can relay this information first hand. If you’re targeting online customers via your website or through social media, you can capture potential subscribers in several ways. Standard practices often use bright and clear call-to-action (CTA) buttons or a well-placed contact form.
Don’t feel tempted to purchase email lists from third-parties. Relying on an outside list is a risky move because the people on that list haven’t necessarily done business with you. Receiving another unsolicited email will likely be annoying and ineffective. It may also violate General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules.
Once you’ve started to build your email list, it’s time to write targeted email content. In most cases, expect a slow start since it requires a bit of background information on your customers. But soon, you’ll be able to categorize email contacts into groups based on similar interests or attributes, like:
Using customer management software is a suitable way to gather this type of information. Until then, a simple, straightforward email with a clear CTA button will suffice. Make sure it’s responsive so that viewing on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device is easy.
Customers should be able to choose the type and frequency of emails they get from your business. That’s where a drip campaign comes in handy. The name gets its inspiration from drip irrigation methods used in farming, in which small amounts of water are used over long periods to water plants or crops.
In other words, you’re nourishing your crops in hopes of creating a bounty. In email marketing, it means you’re nurturing your relationships by sending out a series of automated emails. The drip campaigns can be based on a specific campaign schedule or based on actions customers take.
Drip campaigns work for someone who fits into a specific category or segmentation. That helps ensure they’re receiving the right email at precisely the right time, and eventually leading them to purchase. Most small businesses have a go-to email drip campaign for new customers and another one for existing customers.
A new customer drip campaign might look something like this:
Promo email for first-time purchase
Relevant content of interest
Cart abandonment (reaching out to customers who add items to cart, but leave before checking out)
Thank you for your purchase
An existing customer drip campaign may look something like this:
Regular content marketing emails (sending valuable, non-advertising content to build trust and brand loyalty.
Social promotions
Seasonal promotions
As you gain experience with email marketing, you’ll be able to experiment with different tactics to see if small changes can impact your results. For example, you can send half your email list a message with one subject line and half another subject line and then compare results.
These tests should be side-by-side comparisons, also known as A/B testing. For example, comparing one subject line versus another subject line. You run into problems if you’re testing things that aren’t comparable like a subject line vs. a discount offer.
How do you know if your email program is working? As a small business owner, you may be able to notice the results first hand. You’ll also learn to start tracking key performance indicators like conversion, which means your email inspired an action. That action may be getting a customer to open an email, click a CTA button, fill out an online form, or purchase a product.
Email and social media play nicely together, especially on mobile devices. If you have some compelling, high-performing social content, try including it in emails to increase visibility.
You can also do this by adding social logos in your emails, which encourages people to follow your other channels. If you have a website, you should also include a link to that.
Making emails mobile-friendly matters. There’s nothing worse than opening an email and having to pinch and resize to try to see the content. A recent survey found that 40 percent of respondents say the marketing emails they receive are not optimized for their mobile device.
Here is your chance to set yourself apart from the rest. Optimizing email for various devices will only increase your open-rates. In turn, this raises your opportunities to convert content to revenue.
If you’re interested in learning more best practices for small business digital marketing, check out The Complete Guide to Content Marketing and Four Hacks for Entrepreneur’s Social Media Marketing.
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