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Email marketing is a great channel for small businesses. It can help you grow your customer base, create more brand awareness, build trust, showcase your expertise and, ultimately, drive revenue.
Yet it can also seem very intimidating. “Where do I start?” is a question I often hear from novice email marketers. Other common concerns with SMB email marketing include worries about pricing and the difficulty of finding a solution that meets small business owners' marketing needs.
But worry not. We have put together a small business email marketing 101 to help you understand what you need to do to start getting results.
Email marketing isn’t just for the big boys. Here are the small business email marketing strategies you need to employ to make your campaigns stand out.
Each business will have different email marketing goals. Factors such as the size of your business, your budget, your email marketing experience, your industry, how you prioritize your marketing channels, and whether you are just starting out or you have 20 years’ experience will influence your goals.
For example, if you’ve only just launched your product or service, your goal might be to generate awareness and get as many sign-ups as you can. Whereas if you’re an experienced email marketer and your business is quite well known, your goal could be to drive up your return on investment.
You need to set goals before you do anything else, as this will influence all future steps. It’s also the only way you can truly track success, which we’ll talk about in more detail later.
Your goals can be entirely quantifiable and numbers-based, or they can be more general, such as “build brand awareness.” Here is how you can set your goals.
We’ve got some bad news for you: not everyone is going to want to buy what you’re selling. That’s why you shouldn’t try to target every single living human being, and animal, on the planet. Instead, you need to hone in on the characteristics of the people you want to target.
This takes more work in the short term but pays off in the long term in the form of better engagement and a higher return on investment.
The more clearly you define your audience, the easier it will be to provide relevant, targeted content. Your email list might be smaller, but the people on it are more likely to support your business. Here is how you can define your audience.
When you’re starting out on your email marketing journey, your email list might consist of your mum, your former colleagues, and your dog. And that’s ok, as long as they’ve all agreed to receive your emails and won’t report you for spamming them. Building your email list takes time, but quality is always more important than quantity.
This is where the work you’ve done in the previous step starts to pay off. To build your email list, you need to make sure you are speaking the same language as your target audience when it comes to copy, design, and promotion channels.
For example, if your target audience mainly hangs out on Instagram, promote your email newsletter on this channel to optimize sign-up numbers.
You also need to build sign-up forms to collect customer information and make sure these are optimized so you can get as many people as possible to enter their details.
There is some debate around the importance of email design and whether it is worth spending time making sure every aspect of your message looks amazing.
For example, ConvertKit purposely has a basic email editor, as it believes that it’s the content and the goal of the message that matters most.
Whatever school you subscribe to, it’s still important to put some thought into what goes into each email.
This includes making sure it is on-brand in terms of voice, tone, and style, deciding the goal of each email, and ensuring there are no typos, broken links, or other errors.
If you want to succeed, you need to make your emails as pleasant to read as possible. That’s why you should follow the tips below to understand how to best create and design your emails.
One tactic that some marketers (who don’t read The Ascent) are still using is called batch and blast. This means sending every email you create to every single person on your email list. Don’t do that. People don’t like it, and we’re sure you wouldn’t like it either.
Creating segments allows you to group customers with similar characteristics so you can send them more relevant, targeted emails. You can draw on the work you put in creating your buyer personas, as these will vary for every business.
For example, if you want to promote your ski gear, you can create a segment for everyone who lives in snowy areas. Or if you want to sell more dentures, you could segment according to age. Other customer segmentation examples include using past purchase history and website product views.
Understanding your customers is key to creating the most effective segments. To achieve that you need to harness the power of your data.
Automation is an email marketer’s best friend. Automating manual processes frees you up to concentrate on the areas where you can really add value, such as analyzing data and producing beautiful designs.
As a small business, you probably don’t have a ton of resources, and autoresponders can help you make your limited budget and resources go further.
Autoresponders, otherwise known as drip campaigns or automations, send out a series of emails that are automatically triggered based on customer behavior.
For example, if a customer signs up to your email list, they will automatically be sent the first email in your welcome campaign series. If they haven’t taken action within the next three days, then they’ll receive an email with the best sellers. If they haven’t responded three days after that, then they’ll receive a 10% discount code.
Autoresponders can help nurture customers down the sales line, encourage them to make a purchase, and boost loyalty. Here’s what you need to do to make that happen.
Circling all the way back to step one, we can’t emphasize enough how important it is to track the results of your campaigns to see if you are meeting your goals. Implement a system that tracks the specific metrics that indicate success. This could be opens and clicks, or it could be social media sign-ups.
Remember that not every email you send will be a success, but that is just another opportunity to learn what went wrong and what you can improve. Successful emails can help you understand what you should do more of.
Data, data, data. Here’s how you can get the data you need to improve the performance of your email campaigns.
There are thousands of email marketing solutions on the market, which makes the selection process pretty tricky.
That’s why we’ve put together our list of the best email services for small businesses.
Aside from being easy to use and quick to get up and running, Zoho Campaigns’ price point makes it a great option for small businesses.
They offer two subscription pricing plans. The Email pricing plan starts at $3/month and allows you to send 500 emails/month and manage 750 subscribers, while the Subscriber plan starts at $5/month for unlimited emails for up to 500 subscribers. You can also choose a pay-as-you-go plan that starts at $6 for 250 emails.
Mailchimp is an excellent option for small businesses that don’t have a lot of time and want to get up and running as quickly as possible with minimal support.
It provides personalized in-app advice based on your goals, business size, and email marketing experience. Mailchimp also fully explains features and offers advice on email marketing best practices.
Like Mailchimp, Benchmark Email is hot on its in-app advice and support. It points out features that you might not know about in the form of in-app, popup messages. This is particularly helpful for people who haven’t used email marketing software before.
Benchmark Email also provides direct marketing tips, and one line features explanations as you are using them while advising you what you can do to get the best results.
Sometimes email marketing services can have too many features. Hear me out. The more features -- and the more complicated these features are to use -- the longer it takes to create campaigns and find your way around a solution. That’s why a stripped-back solution that talks in layman’s terms is a good option. Enter VerticalResponse.
VerticalResponse has a simple navigation, which means you can find all the features very quickly. It also includes a video tour to walk you through the different functionality.
Some email marketing software vendors try to hide their support options away unless you pay a premium.
That’s not the case with Mailigen, as it actively encourages people to get in touch. Mailigen provides names, email addresses, and phone numbers for customer support agents at the bottom of the main dashboard.
Mailigen’s purple Help button is visible at all times and allows you to either search the knowledge base or use the live chat option. Mailigen also provides localized support, with customer service agents in New York, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Hong Kong.
This guide was intended to give you the tools and tactics to launch your small business email marketing campaigns. But, it’s now up to you to adapt these strategies to fit your business.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach, so you need to learn what works for your company, which you can only do by trying, testing, analyzing the data, and making adjustments based on that insight.
Our Small Business Expert
We're firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers. The Ascent does not cover all offers on the market. Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team.