Email marketing for small business doesn’t have to be difficult. Here at Spodek & Co., we’ve had great success with our email marketing campaigns and so can you.
And while email marketing for small business isn’t hugely different from that of the big Fortune 500s, there are subtle tweaks you can make to your email marketing campaign to ensure your open rates soar.
Our Top Five Tips For Email Marketing for Small Business
- Make sure your emails reflect your brand. Get creative, use your brand voice, and include your logos, colours, and other identifying imagery. This creates immediate recognition, and draws on the trust you’ve built with your community.
- Know your goals and objectives. These may or may not be the same as your overall business goals and objectives for the calendar year but they should at least be complimentary. Do you want to land more leads? Drive eyeballs to your web site? Increase brand recognition? Or perhaps promote a special monthly offer or incentive program? Fine tune your focus before launching your email marketing campaign.
- Provide top notch content! From your subject line to your sign off and everything in between, make the act of engaging with your emails worth it. Also, make sure your content matches what you’ve teased in your subject line—don’t “trick” people into opening an email. Also, people are busy, so keep it short and sweet when you can, and use lists and bullet points where possible. Use visuals too! Especially when sharing data or poll results, an easily scannable infographic is often more compelling to your reader than paragraphs of copy.
- Include your social and links and other contact information. Don’t make it hard for your readers to reach out to you if they have questions or concerns.
- And finally, make sure your emails are optimized for mobile! More people, a healthy 75 percent in fact, access their email via smartphone or tablet these days than ever before. And they’re often on the run while doing so, which makes well optimized, easy to digest emails (as mentioned in tip #3 above) even more important.
Don’t Forget to Track Campaign Success (or Failure)
No one wants their marketing efforts to fail, but hey, it happens to the best of us! That’s why it’s vitally important you track email campaigns. Keep a sharp eye on big drops in open rates or click throughs.
If these occur, go back to that campaign, and analyze its subject line, content, even the time of day you sent it out. Compare these results to other more successful emails, and tweak accordingly.
This trial and error or A/B testing approach can seem tedious when you’re already swamped running a small business, but it’s worth it. Mail Chimp is a great email marketing service you can use which provides data on clicks, opens, subscribers’ social activity, e-commerce data, and much more. (Caveat: We use MailChimp but are in no way affiliated with the company – we just think it’s great!)
I want to add that the above tips apply to your company newsletter efforts as well.
What are your thoughts on email marketing for small business? Have you had success with your email campaigns?
I would love to know more!
