Email marketing for small business

Email marketing works. Why? Because everyone has one. It would be impossible to function properly in the civilized world if you didn’t have an email ID for yourself. In this article, we look at how email marketing works, its benefits, and the must-have features when you are about to choose one.

What is email marketing?

Targeting a particular group of customers or individuals using email is email marketing. Even responding to a customer’s question can be considered the same. From educating your audience to keeping them hooked to your brand, there are so many things that email marketing does. Email marketing can also play a great role in your marketing strategy by helping with business automation, lead generation, keeping customers engaged, building relationships, and so on.

How does email marketing work? 

Emails date back more than 50 years ago. It was one of the first digital communication tools available. Today, each of us has one. Even though there are several channels available these days, nothing comes close to its effectiveness. In fact, it is not even as complicated as some of the other channels that are available. There is a lot of A/B testing required to get it right, but after you have found what works for you, email marketing is a breeze.

Here is what you should do to be successful at email marketing:

- Choose a good email marketing tool. It is an important step in the process as it will have a huge bearing on how your customers perceive your brand.

- Design an email marketing strategy. You should have designers, copywriters, email marketers, and performance marketing experts to help you with it. 

- Create attractive lead magnets that can be easily consumed, are relevant, actionable, and immediately downloadable. 

- Nurture your email subscribers. It will not only help with building a pipeline of prospective customers, but you can also grow your list. 

- To make the entire process easy, set up automation wherever possible using your email marketing software.

- Monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns through the analytics dashboard aka reporting engine.

- Refine your email list by removing subscribers who have not opened your emails for more than a year or have never engaged with you on any other platform. These are people who are no longer interested in what you offer. The best you can do is let them go as they are only a burden. 

- Keep writing better email copies to increase your conversion. 

- Refine your email marketing strategies.

- Repeat the cycle for more effectiveness.

Why do businesses need email marketing?

Did you know that email marketing has the highest return on investment among all marketing channels? It provides a return of $36 for every $1 you spend on it. Isn’t that incredible? Let’s see what else email marketing offers for small businesses. 

1. Creates brand awareness:

The best thing about email marketing is that it reaches directly into the inboxes of your target audience. Think of it as one-to-one communication, that’s how effective it is. People don’t let anyone enter into their inboxes. Sending a highly personalized email is more effective than a viral social media post. You can even reach out to as many people as possible, you are only limited by the space available and the number of contacts you have access to. 

2. Increases customer loyalty:

You can use email marketing to drive customer loyalty at each stage of the sales funnel. It can be used to nurture your subscribers. Emails can also be a great tool for onboarding and retention. It is even possible to streamline your email conversions in such a way that it can be a lead-to-customer conversion platform. 

3. It is permission-based:

You need to procure the consent of your potential subscribers before you send them emails. It implies that the particular customer has trusted you with their details. This opt-in strategy increases the conversion and open rates, unlike a sponsored reel on Instagram which people find when they are randomly scrolling or reading a pop-up ad. 

4. Improves sales:

The easiest way to increase your sales is by having a stellar communication plan with your potential customers. Everybody loves a good email that is relevant to what they are looking for. While it is not the kind of thing that people usually sound emphatic about, the truth is that finding a good email newsletter is like looking for a small piece of gold in a big barn filled with hay. 

The onus is on the brand to make the emails as creative and worthy for the recipient to engage with it. Your marketing emails can add messages that can persuade customers to open their purse strings. Your email subscribers are more likely to buy from you as they have already opted-in to your emails, and are looking forward to receiving them. 

5. Sends timely campaigns:

Traditional marketing campaigns require the brains of a lot of people and an incredible amount of time to plan and execute it. Even if you do so, there are so many things that can fall apart or are beyond your control. You can create an entire email marketing campaign with little time or even basic planning. It is also possible to schedule it in such a way that the email reaches your audience at the time you intend it to be. 

6. Owning your list:

When you are dependent on a social media platform like Facebook or Instagram, you have to abide by their rules. Many of these rules are stifling, keep changing, and only have the end consumer in mind. Your years of successful strategy can go kaput because of a policy change at your favourite social media platform. It can be disastrous for your business as there are no warnings about the changes either. 

But if you were to build your email list, you own it. You don’t lose the relationship or the reach. You can also interact with them regardless of which email provider you choose. If you move from Facebook to Instagram, you cannot carry over your followers from the former, even though both of them are owned by the same firm.

Features to look for in an email marketing tool:

1. Mobile optimization:

If your email marketing software doesn’t offer mobile optimization, it doesn’t matter if it has all the other features that ever existed in similar software. Most of your users are going to open their email on their mobile devices. Thankfully, most email optimization software optimizes messages automatically for smaller screens. 

2. Segmentation:

You want your emails to reach the right person and not just send all of your emails to every random subscriber. Subscribers will be able to connect with you better when you send them content that is relevant to what they want.  When you choose an email marketing software for small businesses, ensure that it offers the ability to segment your contacts into groups based on a variety of demographic, firmographic, and other relevant information. Look out for email marketing tools that come with premade segments based on open rates, CTA clicks, engagement levels, etc. 

3. Availability of templates:

A good email marketing tool should offer exclusive templates to make it easy for you to get started. Predesigned email templates speed up your process. The tool you choose should offer an exclusive array of templates to design emails that can be customized without requiring any technical knowledge. 

4. Journey builder:

The perks of building an automated email journey are that it keeps your customers engaged. We cannot stress enough on the importance of choosing software where you can create ‘if and when’ scenarios for different instances. 

For example, if a customer doesn’t respond to a survey within five days, you can set the email marketing tool to send a follow-up. 

5. Personalized emails:

Use detailed information about your customers to send personalized emails to resonate with them. It has been proven over and over that personalized emails have a greater effect on the consumer. It increases your open and click-through rates. 

6. Insert live content:

Let’s say there is a marketing campaign with loads of offers for the customer. If a customer clicks on the CTA for the campaign after it ends, do not send them to a page which only mentions that the offer is over. Using the live content feature, you can send them to a different page with deals or direct them to your home page with offers. 

7. Reporting and analytics:

Your email marketing results need to be measured. Find out which type of content works and which one doesn’t. Why was there a huge uptick for your campaign in the end of July while there were hardly any results in the previous campaign a month ago? You can only get to know the difference when you gather the data and analyze the results. 

A good email marketing software will offer an analytics engine that provides a visually-attractive dashboard where you can go through the results. It will also have filters that can be used to arrive at various conclusions. 

8. Operational email deliverability:

What if you spend hours on crafting the perfect email for a pivotal marketing campaign, only to find that it didn’t reach most of the intended recipients? Terrible, isn’t it? Email marketers are petrified at the thought of poor email deliverability hampering their plans. You need to proactively work to create a great sender reputation. 

An advanced email marketing software provides a built-in campaign monitor that tells you which emails are received at the recipients’ inboxes and which ones are not. You can remove the latter from your subscriber list.

Conclusion:

If you are looking for the best email marketing software business, using the above pointers can help a great deal. We are hoping that this article has given you a fresh perspective on email marketing and everything that is possible with it. Do not get overwhelmed by all the information written down here. Get started with it one step at a time.