If you want to connect with your customers, nurture relationships and drive even more sales, email marketing can be a powerful tool for boosting your small business. While all the flashy social media and modern digital channels are popular among people, email marketing has held onto its value and place.
It is still highly effective to let you reach out to your target audience and connect directly. But, is email marketing just to send emails and end? No. Email campaigns for small businesses, when related to the audience and potential customers, boost conversions and encourage engagement.
An engaged email list in email marketing for small business owners can bring great outcomes and long-term benefits for them. The list includes subscribers who are excited to open your email, click on CTAs and take action as desired by the owner. This leads to the building and nurturing of an engaged email list.
But, building an engaged email list isn’t something that can happen in a night – it requires a strategy, and content that attracts and understands the audiences deeply. In this post, we’ll find some practical strategies and email marketing tips for small businesses to grow to create and grow an engaged email list.
By the end, one can have a clear roadmap on how they can boost their email marketing efforts and achieve rich results. One exciting thing about emails? It produces about $36 ROI for every $1 spent on it.
Understanding The Audience: Set The Base Strong
Before we talk about email crafting and subscriber list building, let’s build the base first to make all of our efforts last. Having a deep understanding of the audience becomes crucial especially if you want them to engage regularly and make your email marketing strategy effective.
When understanding the audience, it’s important to focus on two things- the understanding of the buyer’s details and personality. Secondly, the needs and preferences of your audience.
Details Customer Info
The first step is to get more information about your audience – their detailed personalities. Every business has a customer imagery i.e., how their customers would be. This imagery helps in understanding your audience more and choosing who’s your potential customer.
Some factors to consider about the audience are –
- Their demographics – age, gender, location, income and education.
- Psychographics – Interests, hobbies, needs and lifestyle.
- Behaviours – Online habits, purchase history and customer journey.
A business should always have a picture of their customer in mind before reaching out and providing each with their preferences.
Audience’s Needs And Preferences
How can you solve the problem when you don’t know the solution? This part focuses on their customer’s needs, wants and preferences once you’ve developed imagery of your ideal customer.
An email marketing small business should always try to find answers to questions like- what problem their audience faces, what kind of solutions they’re looking for, whether are they motivated to make a purchase, and if not, what can motivate them to purchase. Find out how they prefer to communicate and the type of content they find valuable.
Understanding the audience at a deeper level helps in making email campaigns for small businesses more effective and ready to address the needs and interests of your audience. Personalisation results in even more engagement and conversions.
Understanding the audience helps in setting up a solid base for a successful email marketing strategy. Let’s see how to build an email list!
Building Email List: Grow The Audience
In the previous section, we were just setting up the foundation. The first step towards successful email marketing is building an email list. There are some highly effective strategies to attract the audience and convert them into subscribers. What are they? Let’s find out!
Lead Magnets For Small Business Email Marketing
Lead magnets, just as the name suggests, attract leads. Lead magnets are some free products or services that a small business offers to the audience in exchange for email addresses.
An enticing offer that aligns with the audience’s needs and interests can make it easier for a business to get their email addresses! The freebie can include ebooks or guides that cover a particular relevant topic in detail. Checklists and templates are popular as well as they help in solving the problems of the audience.
One can offer discounts or offers to new subscribers to get their email addresses. Not only this, but you can also offer webinars and workshops to educate your audience and give them valuable knowledge on a certain topic.
These are just some ideas. One can offer their audience something else as well that fits their budget and makes the customer happy enough to give you the email address.
Opt-in Forms
Opt-in forms act like an entry door to your email list. These should be clear, on the point and visually attractive. Some popular ways with different placement options of opt-in platforms include inserting a pop-up, these are timed pop-ups to capture attention.
If pop-ups aren’t your thing, you can opt for embedded forms. These are the form links placed in the content itself to let the user sign up easily if they want. With that, slide forms are no less. They appear on a screen partially – taking the reader’s attention but not disturbing them.
Email marketing for businesses can appear to be tricky sometimes – just like the opt-in forms. So choose the method and place that works the best for you and has more traffic than the other pages respectively to get the maximum number of email addresses.
Organic Email List Growth
Building an email list needs a strategic approach. Some organic list growth strategies for local business email marketing are-
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Social Media Promotions
People are attracted to social media – all kinds of people are active on them, you just need to find your type and start approaching. Yes! Social media can be used to promote content and encourage people to sign up, eventually, include them in your email list,
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Blog And Content Marketing
Extend the offers of providing incentives and freebies through blogs and content. Secure a small part at the beginning, end or middle of it and extend the offer in exchange for subscribing. But, don’t be persuasive.
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Referral Program
Words of mouth have a great effect on people – those words make you trust and approach a brand or a person even if you don’t know them, just by listening about it from another person. Encourage your existing customers and audience to refer you to their friends and give rewards for the same!
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Offline Approach
Suppose you have an offline office, or if not, you go to events and socialise much. Here, you can yourself reach out to people, face them and talk to them about your brand. You can directly ask for their email addresses. This way, you introduce your brand and build your email list simultaneously.
While these are some approaches when you just need to invest your time and efforts, there are other approaches as well where you can save your time and effort by investing money.
As assumed they’re Google Ads and Social Media Advertising. Google helps in reaching out to potential keywords for the keywords that you ask for. This way, you get relevant audience who’re looking for something just like what you provide.
On the other side, social media advertising focuses on targeting people with specific demographics and interests that you’re looking for in your ideal audience.
All these discussed strategies, when combined, can let you build a robust email list from scratch which leads to a successful campaign for small business email marketing.
Creating Content That Attracts: Engage With Subscribers
You see, we have a solid email list now, so what’s stopping you from reaching out and connecting with them? Content? Don’t worry, we’ll solve it for you. Here, we’ll focus on creating content that resonates with and captivates your audience and encourages them to engage. Some strategies are discussed below.
Segmentation Of The Email List
Segmentation is most important for sending content to the audience. Each of them has different interests, needs and locations. They all are reaching out to you for the same thing but different needs.
In this case, to maximise the effect of content, you should segment your email list. On what basis? Firstly, demographics. This focuses on the age, gender and location of a person. If your product has anything to do with age and gender, definitely segment it. Group your audience for different locations to align with their timings.
Other factors to focus on while segmenting are their interests and behaviours. Focus on the product your audience uses or finds useful the most. Additionally, get a clear understanding of their purchase history and engagement with your website. Segmented emails often drive 30% more open rates and 50% more CTR than unsegmented emails.
This way, you’ll be able to find their needs, interests and preferred timings to get an email. You’ll be able to deliver personalised and relevant content through segmenting.
Developing A Content Calendar
A content calendar improves consistency. But, what’s a content calendar? It’s a plan where you decide what your email campaigns will hold in advance. It is made up of the content type, the days to send them, the timings and the groups to send them to. This helps in being consistent and prevents missing any of it.
You’re prepared in advance, and this also lets you focus on other tasks that need more of your attention. While the days and timing to send the emails depend on your business’s needs and users’ preferences, the content category remains the same.
A content calendar has mainly three categories of content – as said, a mix of different things keeps the audience interested and engaged. The types of emails one can send are-
- Promotional Emails: This email promotes your product, services or anything that you want to, like website blogs and even social media pages.
- Informative Content: In these emails, you focus on providing information and educating the audience. It can be tips, news, insights and even educational resources from your website.
- Engaging Content: While you provide information, educate and promote your business, you should also give a moment to your audience to revert, express themselves and engage. So, these engaging emails are the reflection of what your audience has to say or have said.
It includes stories from customers, their testimonials and even content and fun activities like polls and surveys.
Subject Lines That No One Can Resist
No doubt subject lines are the first impression of your emails. You send an email, your audience receives it – the first thing they see is, the subject lines. So, why compromise with that? Always put efforts into crafting subject lines for emails that are catchy, interesting and enticing.
How can you craft great subject lines that no one can resist? We’ll help you with it!
- Keep them short, concise and interesting. Set its limit to 50 characters so it can be read without any part getting hidden or having a need to open it up to read. This lets users know what’s inside for them.
- Make it interesting with something that catches the attention. It can be tweaked in the language – a question, a bold statement, teasing of some valuable information and even an informing sentence that says what’s the offer that’s waiting for them inside.
- Avoid Misleading; be specific and relevant. The biggest problem nowadays is the emails that mislead. The audience loses interest in it. Be honest with them, always. Don’t use any links, information or language that misleads or offends.
Don’t make promises that can’t be fulfilled such as, 100% free or any phrases of this kind.
Communicate with them and be genuine. Talk about your goals, what you want to provide them with, what you expect from them and even just what’s in the email for your audience.
- To make your reader open up the email, personalise the subject lines and create a sense of urgency. Use your reader’s name and any information or facts about them. Create a sense of urgency like, there’s limited time, exclusive promotion, a profitable offer or, just be direct with them.
- Using emojis, humour and different forms of language can also help build interest in your audience and click on the email to know what’s actually inside.
These are some ideas to craft subject lines, you can include more, and test more! But, be sure to not use spam trigger words, focus on providing value and most importantly, don’t lose the creativity.
Creating Engaging And Personalised Email Content
While we finish off creating subject lines, it’s important to create content that’s effective and resonates as well. Using a conversational tone, keeping the emails short and direct and including a clear CTA make up for more than half of your efforts.
The remaining efforts consist of personalising emails by using names and their preferences, including visuals such as images, GIFs and videos and, storytelling to keep your audience engaged and connect with them emotionally.
The main focus should be on personalisation as it makes the reader feel valued, known and connected. It results in stronger relationships, improved engagement and increased conversions. Personalised emails show an increase in open rates by 26%.
Engaging With The Subscribers: Stronger Relationships
Now that you’ve gained subscribers, you are wishing to turn them into your loyal customers, aren’t you? It will take time and effort and prove to be a long-term success.
Here are some email marketing ideas for small businesses focusing on the part where they engage with the subscribers deeply.
Welcome Email Series To Make The First Impression
Once someone subscribes to your email list, your duty is to welcome them. Make it a habit. The welcome email helps in introducing your business, building trust and setting expectations.
A series of welcome emails must include a welcome note thanking them to join, providing value i.e., a discount or an offer and, an introduction to your business, products and services that you provide.
Automation Of Email Campaigns
It’s wise to adapt technology and move forward as time passes. The world has been introduced to AI and many more similar technologies. In the midst of all of it, there have been updations in the email marketing space as well i.e., the automation.
Email automation saves time and effort for repetitive tasks and boosts efficiency. One can use email automation for certain kinds of email –
- Welcome series
- Abandoned cart reminder to recover lost sales
- Follow-ups after purchase to encourage them to purchase again
- Birthday or anniversary wishes email to connect personally.
This helps in doing all of it on time, without missing a minute and gives you the freedom to focus on other tasks while this all happens automatically. Additionally, businesses that use automation in email marketing to nurture leads, observe a 451% increase in qualified prospects.
Interactive Emails To Boost Engagement
No one likes general things these days, they want something interesting, interactive as well as useful. People give value to infotainment now. How can you still win their hearts? It’s simple!
Include polls and quizzes in your emails to let users give their opinion and participate. Provide recommendations that are personalised according to their preferences. Interactive graphics play a great role in engaging and providing a visual experience.
Additionally, you can also start a series of emails, which continue one after another. Such as, you ask a question in an email and ask your users to send answers to it. Next week, the same day, at the same time, you reveal the answer and announce the winner.
You can also offer small rewards and prizes to encourage people to engage. This boosts engagement and makes people regularly open your emails out of curiosity.
Test And Monitor
What are the two steps that matter the most? Testing and monitoring. Why? Let’s find out.
What would have happened if no one in the world tested which fruit is poisonous or edible or, if the fire can be handled or not? We would’ve been in the Stone Age now. The same goes for email marketing. If people wouldn’t have tested various strategies in email marketing, we wouldn’t be talking about email marketing.
So, one of the important tasks in email marketing is to test. Create different subject lines, content formats, design elements and even interactive types of email and test them if they work or not.
To make it easier, A/B testing was introduced where there are small groups of subscribers and you send different formats of content with the same intention. This helps you know which format works best. This way, you’re able to develop the idea of content your audience wants.
Another important task is to monitor. You take exams, we all do, but we get the results as well. Why, to find out what is that we’re strong in and what needs to be improved.
Similarly, in email marketing, some metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates and bounce rates are monitored to find out what’s working great and what needs to be improved in order to make the email campaigns effective.
Continuously testing and monitoring can strengthen your hold on the campaigns of email marketing for small businesses by identifying the improvement areas and optimising the same accordingly.
Maintaining Email List: Keep It Healthy
Have you heard that one rotten apple rots the other fresh apples as well? And do you know that some dead email addresses affect your entire email marketing campaign metrics negatively? It’s hard to swallow, but it’s true.
Email addresses become invalid and outdated with time, just like links on the website – they need to be removed, replaced and cleaned regularly. If not, you’ll be at a great loss and go back many steps from your success.
The email addresses that need to be removed are –
- Those that are inactive for a long period of time.
- The emails that are permanently hard to deliver.
- The ones that result in delivery failures temporarily.
Moving forward, as a business owner, you should respect your subscriber’s decision if they unsubscribe. Remove them from your list and don’t bother them by sending further emails.
Adding to it, those who are still on the list, or wish to join, embrace them and provide value. When emails are delivered correctly and reach the audience, it ensures that your emails are reaching the inbox instead of spam folders.
To manage good email deliverability, one should adapt and follow these best practices –
- Using SPF, DKIM and DMARC to verify the domain and be authentic.
- Encouraging high open and click-through rates to improve engagement.
- Avoid sending spammy content or excessive links and focus on providing quality content.
- Keeping the list clean and engaged to ensure there’s no negative impact on the email marketing campaign.
When we prioritise email list maintenance, we prioritise email campaign success. This improves email marketing performance and builds a strong reputation among other business owners and subscribers.
Conclusion: An Engaged Email List
Building an engaged email list and nurturing it is a pillar that helps build and support successful small business email marketing. Once you understand your audience and gauge their needs and interests, you’ve done half of the work already.
Crafting attractive content, and subject lines and implementing strategies along with small business email marketing tips can transform an email list into a valuable asset that provides long-term profits.
Email marketing requires consistent efforts and time to make it successful and reach its goals. It needs a lot of experiments, failures and adaptation to various strategies to turn into a robust campaign. Some of the key takeaways of this blog are –
- Understanding the audience is a must – the first step before any other step.
- High-quality and valuable content once or twice a week is far better than dull and spammy content every day.
- Building trust and turning your subscribers into loyal customers becomes easy through consistent engagement.
- Automation saves time and effort and boosts work efficiency – adapting to automation can prove to be a boon for your small business.
- Testing and monitoring emails regularly helps in improving and optimising email marketing campaigns accordingly.
Investing time and effort in email marketing will turn into strong customer relationships, increase sales and altogether, turn your email marketing campaign into a long-term success for your small business.
Start building an engaged email list today to give way to success and achieve all your small business email marketing goals!