How to Grow Your Small Business with These 10 Effective Email Marketing Tips

Email marketing is an effective digital marketing solution for small business that has the potential to produce on average a return on your investment of $36 for every $1 spent.

The number of emails sent is expected to grow to over 376 million by 2025 you’re going to need to implement a good email strategy to make your business stand out.

A few top emails marketing tips to help you do that include:

• Getting personal.
• Segmenting your mailing list.
• Having clear call to actions.
• Creating mobile friendly emails.
• Making sure to test subject headlines.

Do this, and it can not only help your open rates but your conversions too.

Top 10 Email Marketing Tips

Here are a few of our tops tips to help you increase the returns you get from an often overlooked but effective marketing channel for converting new customers and retaining your current ones.

1. Use lead generation tools

Growing your mailing list is one key way to help increase your returns, the more people you have to shout out to about your product or service, the more chance you’ll make a sale.

To do this effectively, you’re going to want to try and get hold of a new customer’s email address whenever they interact with your online website.

Using cleverly placed forms and call to action to sign up is a good method, but having custom landing pages targeted to the actions your user (and hopefully new customer) is currently performing can help increase your chance of a signup.

Email marketing tools for small business like Sendinblue and Aweber have the built-in functionality to help you create eye-catching landing pages, which you can use across your website and direct people to when they perform a certain action.

Depending on the action, using different landing pages helps drive that new email signup.

These email tools can also integrate into popular CRM systems to help automate actions and add their details to your database for later followups.

2. Personalize your emails

Being personal is smart, not just in email marketing campaigns but across all interactions with your customers. A personalized touch helps make people feel familiar and more likely to trust your brand.

Here’s an email campaign tip for you; if you can, add your customers’ names to your emails. It’ll help with that familiar feeling and trust factor.

But personalization is more than just adding a name and some conversational tone to your campaigns. If you have the data, add products, services, or articles into your emails that your customer has personally shown interest in in the past.

If they are already interested in something, it increases the likeliness they’ll click through to see more products or what you’ve been promoting.

3. Segment your audience

Segmenting your mailing lists ties in a little with being personable in your emails.

Through online surveys and other analytics tools, you can track to see who is interested in what areas of your business and segment your email lists into groups to reflect this. This segmentation goes for country-specific promotions, too. There’s no point targeting someone in the US if you only deliver your product to the UK.

Segmenting helps ensure you’re promoting the right product to the right people and can help with your overall conversions.

4. Automate your Mailing List

Time is a significant factor in running a small business. There are many things to get done and never enough time or resources to get it done the way you want. So why not save yourself or your marketing team time in the long run by setting up automated emails.

Many of the best email marketing software will let you set up an automated series of emails that help with retaining the interest of your subscribers. You can create a curated list of emails to go the moment they sign up. Each week, you can provide a new action or remind them about your brand.

On top of that, if you’re using a CRM software like monday.com, you can integrate automated rules into it. These automations help send emails when a user performs a desired action getting them to share what they did (help promote your brand for you) or give them the details of their latest purchase.

Add time-saving to your lists, and you’ll reap the rewards.

5. Have a clear CTA

Whenever you send an email, make sure there is a clear Call to Action (what you want your subscriber to do) highlighted near the top.

Don’t flood your emails with multiple buttons or links. Give it one defined area where you’re going to place your link, and this will help increase your email click-through rate.

Distractions are not only productivity killers but also conversion killers. Make it easy for your subscribers to know what to do next and what they get when clicking the button. Only then will you see an improvement in your CTRs.

6. Design your emails for your business and occasion

Keeping your message on point is a great tip, don’t add pages of waffle to an email as no one is ever going to read it. You’ll most likely end up with them deleting it or unsubscribing from your list.

Our top email marketing design tip is to customize your emails for the type of business you have and the occasion.

If you’re selling products and want to showcase a new range that your subscriber might be interested in, then add images that can be clicked on to go to the exact products and a ‘show all’ or ‘more products’ style link placed prominently.

If it’s an email with their latest purchase or just informational, using images that distract from the information can hinder your efforts more than help.

Perhaps you don’t have products to sell but offer tips on how to do something, then a short plain text email with a prominent text link could be the key to more clicks.

There’s many online tools that can help small business and email marketers save time doing this, why build one from scratch if there are already tested templates that work? Tools like Mailchimp and Constant Contact have easy to use drag and drop style email editors with lots of email templates to choose from.

7. Create mobile-friendly emails

Don’t just create beautiful-looking emails for desktops and laptops. Make sure your email looks good on mobile devices too.

With over 64% of people opening emails on their mobile, you could be missing out on sales if you don’t.

8. Test emails & subject lines

Test your emails, whether it’s a curated series for new subscribers or emails of your latest products. Before you send them, you need to test them. Send them to yourself, view them on your mobile, and make sure that they show as expected.

Remember, you’re competing with a whole load of emails every day, and if yours turns up formatted incorrectly, it could land in the Spam folder or not have the desired effect.

It’s not just that your email looks good when sending that you need to test. Test your email subject lines. Send a batch of emails with one headline and a set with another and see which gets more open rates.

This testing will give you an insight into which type of subject headlines to use in future emails. Some email marketing software has this functionality built-in, but you’ll probably have to pay for a higher plan than just the base one.

9. Analyze your email marketing data

If you’re creating emails and sending them out and think that’s the end, you need to read this tip.

Once you’ve hit that send button is when the work of optimizing for your future emails comes into play.

By analyzing your open rates, and click-through rates based on time of day, day of the week, and subject lines, you’ll be able to get an overview of what’s working and what’s not.

Do more of what’s working. For a small business, it’s good to do more of what is working and forget the rest. Analytics is your friend and should be looked at every time you send an email.

The good news is that most email marketing tools come with some form of built-in analytics, so you’ll be able to see an overview of how your emails are performing.

10. Pick the best day of the week to send

Getting an email opened and read, let alone a link in your email clicked, can seem like an upward struggle. Small businesses that often see low open rates are perhaps sending at the wrong time of day. According to a study done by Campaign Monitor there are a few days of the week which could help you out.

• Monday is the best day of the week with a 22% open rate and a 2.3% click-through rate
• Tuesday and Wednesday come in second with 21.8% open rate but a higher 2.4% click through rate

Send your emails on the right day of the week, and just a tiny percentage increase in opens could see a significant increase in profits.

Bonus Tip: Let people unsubscribe easily

There’s no point sending emails and wasting your send budget on people who aren’t interested in what you do anymore.

Clean out your mailing lists weekly or monthly, depending on how big it is. This helps make sure you focus on the people who want to hear from you.

Cleaning your mailing list will save you money, and make sure you’re getting those improved open rates and click-through rates.

Final Thoughts on Growing Your Small Business with Email Marketing

Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed my list of tips for successful email marketing. Take the time to implement a few in your small business, and let us know how you got on.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our mailing list and get more tips and techniques, articles, and business tools direct to your inbox.

Tools mentioned in this article

AWeber

An online marketing tool that helps engage with your audience through email & web push notifications

Sendinblue

An online marketing platform featuring email, sms and CRM to help promote your brand and grow your business

Constant Contact

An online email marketing software that gives you the digital marketing tools you need to get results from your campaigns

Mailchimp

An online email marketing software used to manage multi-channel marketing campaigns for your business