Email Marketing For Small Businesses

Small business marketing might be a headache for many, as the owners try to find the best tools and platforms to invest in.

Small businesses are looking for effective ways to boost their presence and engagement with a limited budget, ensuring that the money is well spent.

Email marketing has experienced huge growth in the past decade. Besides, 73% of customers prefer email as a marketing channel between business and consumer.

With more organizations adopting emails to their marketing, small businesses are no exception. Multiple advantages can be seen from email marketing as it can bring a potential return on investment of up to 41 times!

If we haven’t convinced you enough, keep reading as we are about to give you full guidance on how email marketing can be used for your small business.

Email Marketing: What is it?

In simple terms, email marketing is basically showcasing, advertising, and promoting your business via email. When successful, email marketing brings you financial results and builds relationships between brands and their customers.

With email being two-way communication, businesses need to understand that it is not only about pushing promotions and getting spammy. This will not bring the organizations any long-term results or relationships.

Consistency is key in email marketing, so if you are looking for lasting success, you should get to know your subscribers and communicate with them.

You should also keep them up to date with the relevant information, respond to the comments and concerns, evaluate your performance and create strategies that will contribute to successful business growth.

Benefits of Email Marketing

Email marketing can be very resourceful for small businesses. Its ability to target different segments and reach large numbers of people gives an opportunity for growth.

So let’s look into some great advantages and see how email marketing could benefit your organization.

Brand recognition: Email marketing allows you to brand your emails. You can put logos or any other brand-related attributes which you will consistently use in the emails. After a while, the readers will be able to recognize the company online and offline, but of course, your branding needs to be consistent everywhere.
Segmentation and personalized content: Email marketing enables you to segment your audience into smaller groups based on the information you have about them (age, gender, location, purchasing behavior, etc.). With the segments and information you have about the subscribers, you can tackle customized emails that are more personal and based on the recipients’ preferences.
Website traffic: Once you send your emails, you can include the links to the blog or website for people to follow. When sending an email campaign to the subscriber, you should always add a call-to-action button. A link directing your clients to the website is an excellent opportunity to increase the traffic and get people interested in the product or service you are offering.
Relationship building: As mentioned previously, email marketing is an excellent way to tackle the relationships between a business and its customers. Once you have information on your subscribers, it is easy to provide them with content they need and want. You can also pay special attention to loyal customers by sending personalized birthday coupons or any other special offers to show your appreciation.
Evaluation and analytics: Email marketing has excellent analysis methods that help businesses learn from their mistakes and do better. You can monitor opening rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, or any other information which can help you evaluate your progress. With some testing and performance review, you will tackle the campaigns that won’t be denied.

Small Business Email Marketing: The Steps

Now you know the benefits of email marketing and cannot wait to try it out. However, there are a few steps you have to follow to successfully enter the email marketing game:

Email List: Before the entire email process, you have to gather the data. To do that, you need to collect email addresses to send the email campaigns and, if possible, some other information for segmentation and personalization. To do that, you should create a sign-up form that you could use on your social media platforms, website or blog. Ensure that your sign-up is easy to understand, so people are fully aware of what they will get. Also, make it simple as people will not be filling long sign-up forms where they have to fill tons of fields before they can subscribe to your email.
Content: Once you collected the list of people you can send the emails to, it is time to think about the content. Decide on what type of emails you will be sending and of course, think about your organization’s goals and strategies that need to be implemented.

Here is a list of emails you might want to consider for your small business:

Welcome Emails
Purchase Confirmation Emails
Abandoned Cart Emails
Seasonal Messages (Christmas, Easter, birthdays, or any other holiday)
Loyalty Programs for VIP Customers
Promotional and Sales Emails
Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly Newsletters

Email Design: After deciding on the type of emails you will send to your subscribers, the email design process should start. But before you begin, you should always keep your goals and strategies in mind to ensure that you can evaluate and analyze the performance later on.
When creating emails, ensure your text is nicely spaced, and there are some supporting visuals within it. Images, GIFs, and videos can also be added to attract attention. Seasonal or brand colors should also be incorporated. Also, do not forget about the subject line, as it is the first thing your recipient will see – an engaging start would be beneficial.
Lastly, your email should always include a call-to-action button that will ask your subscribers to take a particular action (go to your website, blog, make a purchase, download a file, etc.).

Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing would not be available without tools that help you create stunning email campaigns that deliver. An email marketing tool will help you with design and creation as most of the platforms have inbuilt library templates you can look at and adapt to your own emails.

Moreover, you will have segmentation opportunities, where the data about your subscribers can be stored and, later on, applied to personalize the campaigns.

Also, the tools have integration abilities so that you can connect your e-commerce store or any other site to your email marketing platform. Automations are essential, too, since you will be able to set automatic emails which will be sent after a customer has taken a specific action.

All email marketing tools also have excellent performance evaluation and analytics options so you can review your results efficiently, adjust and adapt your content, strategies, or goals if required.

Lastly, it is important that email marketing tools would be budget-friendly as small businesses do not have many funds to invest. The majority of the platforms offer a free plan or at least a free trial with some of the features included.

Luckily, one email marketing platform offers a free forever plan that includes all of the features mentioned above! Sender gives an opportunity to enjoy the benefits of email marketing by supplying all the functions absolutely free of charge so you can tackle your email campaigns without stressing about the finances.

Summary: Email Marketing for Small Businesses

Whether the business is big or small, email marketing can help to tackle the strategies and goals. By including emails in your marketing, you will benefit from better brand recognition, the increased website traffic, and stronger relationships with your clients. Besides, you will have an opportunity to provide your subscribers with personalized content, especially for them!

Before you start the email marketing journey, you should build an email list, decide what types of emails are needed for the business, and start creating content and designing the layouts. Once you send your campaigns, it is necessary to evaluate the performance and check what could be improved to step up your game even further.

Lastly, to give you a helping hand, an email marketing tool is a must! It will benefit you with many features that will ease your work. There are many free options to use so that you could save the funds of your small business for another matter.