Navigating the world of email marketing can be intimidating, especially for beginners.
Learning relevant email marketing best practices can help you grow your business and build lasting customer relationships. That’s why we’ve gathered these nine expert-backed best practices to help small business owners get the most out of their email campaigns and achieve better results.
In this blog post, we’ll share proven strategies to create effective, high-performing email campaigns that will take your small business to the next level.
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What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a digital strategy focused on promoting products or services by sending targeted emails to customers. This can include promotional messages, newsletters, and updates that help build relationships with your audience. You can guide potential buyers through their journey by delivering personalized content and tailoring your emails to customer preferences.
An effective email marketing campaign involves segmentation, compelling content creation, automation, and analysis of results. Marketers track success using key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. It’s a cost-efficient way for businesses to engage with leads, nurture relationships, and turn prospects into loyal customers.
Email marketing best practices for small businesses
Here are some email marketing best practices for small businesses to apply in your campaign for increased visibility and engagement:
1. Clearly define your business goals
In setting a goal for your business, the focus should revolve around these key points:
- to increase ROI
- to improve loyalty among clients
- to maintain relationships with clients and
- to increase brand relevance
When you have a clearly defined goal, it should include steps to growing your email list, increasing your email open rate, increasing the click-through rate, increasing the response and feedback rate, increasing sales, reducing the unsubscribe rate, improving brand awareness, and improving customer engagement and customer relationships.
2. Do not buy subscribers online
When your email list is filled with inorganic subscribers bought online, you will most likely witness a hike in subscribers opting out and spamming your campaign.
You don’t have to blame them! They are unaware of your services or brand, and it just comes in as a strange message, so they can either unsubscribe or spam the mailing address.
3. Segment your email list
This is one of the most important email marketing best practices you need to follow because it determines the effectiveness of your campaigns.
In segmentation, you break down your list into groups that have some similarities. This practice will help reduce the rate of people unsubscribing from your services.
When you segment your list based on the user’s location, gender, area of interest, etc., they will most likely interact with your content.
4. Send personalized emails
Some software programs help you personalize your email content and subject lines.
For instance, MailDrip offers creators a solution to email personalization, easier email marketing solutions, and saves time.
Personalization boosts email open rates for many users, and your campaign will perform massively with the right actions.
You should also consider email descriptiveness. Your subject line and email content should communicate the idea of your promotion descriptively.
5. Optimize emails for all device types
Small business owners should make it a habit to optimize emails for all types of devices. When the critical sections of an email are not displayed fully on a subscriber’s device, they will most likely unsubscribe as they might view the message as potential spam.
Ensure the email is displayed correctly on mobile and desktop views to reduce unsubscribe rates.
6. Consider A/B testing for optimized email performance
Try the A/B testing in email marketing for better decisions on the strategy to employ in your campaign.
Here are some tips for A/B testing:
- Don’t be too quick to make a choice. For A/B testing, draft two versions of an email: one with a few minor adjustments or a different call to action and the other version with no change made to it. Don’t run multiple tests on the same campaign at once.
- Ensure you have a large enough sample size to obtain significant results. A low number of responders might give you a false or biased result.
- Carefully analyze the data to identify the winning variations.
A/B testing is an ongoing process that requires several experiments to see what works best and how you can refine your email strategy.
7. Let your CTA be clear
A clearly defined call to action (CTA) encourages your readers to complete the targeted action, such as downloading material, attending a webinar, or purchasing.
You can increase your click-through and conversion rates by crafting compelling CTAs and strategically placing them within your emails.
Here are some tips for creating effective CTAs:
- Use strong action verbs: Words like “download,” “shop now,” or “register” encourage immediate action.
- Create a sense of urgency: Limited-time offers, scarcity tactics or time-sensitive deadlines can motivate your audience to act quickly.
- Use clear and concise language: Avoid jargon or overly complex language. Keep your CTA message simple and easy to understand.
- Highlight your CTA: Use bold fonts, contrasting colors, or eye-catching visuals to draw attention to your CTA.
- Test different CTAs: Experiment with different CTA variations to see what works best for your audience.
- Place your CTA strategically: Consider the layout of your email and where your CTA will be most visible.
With sharp CTA over time, small businesses can drive leads and increase brand engagement.
8. Plan your content
Planning your email schedule, messaging hierarchy, and content type is vital in email marketing for a small business. This is known as strategic content planning.
Craft a content calendar to maintain a regular email flow and organize your schedule. Varying the type of content you deliver to cover the season and mood will keep your audience interested and engaged.
9. Automate emails
Email automation involves using email marketing software to send automatic emails to subscribers based on certain predefined criteria.
MailDrip is a tested and trusted email marketing automation software.
Benefits of email automation:
- It automates repetitive tasks and saves time.
- It helps to improve customer engagement by delivering personalized and timely messages.
- It leads to increased sales and revenue.
- It helps to track and analyze campaign performance to optimize future efforts.
Benefits of using MailDrip for small business email marketing
The MailDrip software offers a free plan (with limited capabilities for automation), and the premium plans are the best for everything automation-related. The software performs email automation and audience segmentation for a successful email campaign.
Here are other benefits you will enjoy when you use MailDrip software:
- MailDrip helps create email campaigns that target specific customers for higher engagements.
- The software is easy to use. Your business can use it to create engaging, personalized, user-friendly, interactive email content.
- With MailDrip, you can monitor the performance of your business’s personalized emails.
- With its advanced features, you can enhance your email marketing using the powerful pro tools.
Conclusion
Incorporating these nine email marketing best practices into your small business can make a huge difference. Remember, consistency is key.
You might not see all the results at once; however, consistently keeping your audience interested with relevant, timely content and strong CTAs will increase engagement, loyalty, and sales.
MailDrip is a valuable tool for streamlining processes, automating, and personalizing easily.
With these strategies in place, your small business can unlock the full potential of email marketing. Keep refining your approach, experiment with new ideas, and use data-driven insights to guide your decisions.
Signup on MailDrip to get the latest trends in email marketing.
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