Email Marketing for Small Businesses: 6 Tips for Creating Better Email Campaigns

With the right email marketing strategy, email marketing can be a cost-effective way for small businesses to connect with existing customers, build customer loyalty, and increase conversion. As a small business owner or marketer, you may have a limited budget for marketing investment, but email marketing campaigns are essential for growing your audience and maintaining profitable relationships with those who’ve already made a purchase.

If you’re looking for email marketing tips for small businesses, you’ve come to the right place. ? In this post we’ll cover email marketing best practices from subject line optimization to calls to action, and we’ll explain  how your small business can benefit from having an email marketing strategy. Let’s get to it!

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the term used to define the process of sending commercial messages to a target audience with the aim of driving sales or, in the short term, keeping them warm.  Most of us have received emails from other brands with information about their products and special offers every now and then, and we’ve doubtless all signed up to receive emails from brands we like or value. 

The goal of email marketing should be less about blasting out sales information to your contact list, and more about building relationships. Look at it as a channel where you can speak directly to your customers through their inbox. 

For a small business like yours, email marketing can turn a tiny audience into an online community of dedicated customers that are enthusiastic about your products and services.

1. Define Your Target Audience

Put simply, your target audience is the group of people who are most likely to purchase or need your goods or services. This is why you have to spend time researching your users’ interests, pain points, and preferences to be able to define your target audience before you start identifying ways to reach them and be in a position to have their email addresses.

Here are some questions that may help you discover and learn more about who you’re trying to reach via your next marketing campaign:

• What is your target demographic?
• What industry do they work in?
• What are their interests and hobbies?
• What are their purchase behaviors?
• What are their pain points (what problems do your products or services solve)?

By asking these questions and identifying their key characteristics, motivations and other differentiators, you can build better personalized emails and increase the possibility of them signing up to receive them..

2. Tailor Your Content to Your Audience

Boosting sales is a critical goal for any small business, however, generating income should not be the primary concern of all your email communication. You might have different types of email – from welcome emails and email newsletters to transactional emails and re-engagement offers that you’ll send to a particular number of subscribers at any time. 

The content presented in these emails should be valuable and relevant to the segment that you’re sending to, based on factors including:

• Demographic information
• Engagement levels
• Historical buying behavior

Whether it’s a one-off send or an automation, each of your email campaigns needs to have a clear content strategy and calls to action that make sense to the users who will receive them. 

While social media marketing might reach a broader audience, with email marketing you’ve got the opportunity to create content that’s really tailored and personalized to the customers and subscribers you’re sending to. This is particularly true because you know something about them – or at least you should do via your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

A great place to begin when you want to create and send an email campaign is with email templates. You can find templates for all kinds of objectives and industries, and they help speed up and simplify the process of designing an email because you don’t have to start from scratch.

3. Make Use of Email Automation

Email automation is a smart way to stay in touch with your audience on a regular basis by doing most of the heavy lifting up front. With an automated email service, you can create emails that can send the right messages at the right time – when they’re triggered by events such as a sale, a lapsed customer or an email signup. Some of the things you can do with email automation include:

• Welcome emails: One of the  most important emails a brand can send is a welcome email. This type of email let’s your new subscribers know you’ve received their information and added it to their contact list – and gives them a taste of what they may expect from your emails going forward.
• Abandoned cart emails: Sending emails when a user has abandoned a shopping cart allows you to reach out to undecided customers and give them a second chance to finish a purchase.
• Offers for inactive subscribers: Rekindle the interest of inactive users by offering a discount on a previous purchase or an item that complements what they’ve bought previously. By expanding their purchasing options, you increase the possibility of retaining their business for future sales.

By using email automation, you can be more precise, targeted, and efficient when communicating with your audience than ever before. You can also do split testing of everything from subject lines to images, to help drive KPIs such as open rates, CTR, and conversion.

4. Increase Email Open Rates

An email open rate measures the number of subscribers who opened an email versus the total number of subscribers who received the campaign. A low open rate suggests a lack of interest in your email sends – and limits the opportunity you have to communicate to those customers. 

There are ways to increase your open rates, including these two big ones::

• Create engaging subject lines: Your email subject line is similar to your article or blog post headline. A successful subject line typically includes action words and a length of 6-10 words maximum. It’s recommended that you split test your subject lines on a regular basis to learn more about what makes your audience open your emails.

• Write like a real human being: A message that is personable and welcoming is generally more successful than one that is generic. Inserting the customer’s name in the subject line, posing a question or teasing a tip or trick are other ways to add interest.

• Avoid too much sales talk: Overused sales words such as “buy”, “clearance” or “free” can sometimes send your emails straight to the spam folder.

Remember that high open rates aren’t the only metric of a successful email campaign. But if customers aren’t opening your emails at all, you’re back to square one. 

5. Include Call To Actions (CTA)

After your subscribers read your emails, they  need to be clear on what next steps to take. That’s why you must provide a clear and obvious call to action in your campaigns. Some examples of effective phrases in your CTAs could include:

• “Sign up for a free trial”
• “Learn more over on our blog”
• “Shop the sale now”
• “Download the guide”
•  

In summary, your CTA should be clear, to the point, and offer a reason for your subscriber to take the action that you want them to, over and above everything else they could do next.

6. Don’t Forget the Power of Social Media

Last, but not least, don’t underestimate the impact of social media marketing when it comes to your email strategy. Email marketing and social media can be used in combination to draw attention to your content, products, and services and connect to your customers across channels.

Some ways you could do this include:

•  Promote exclusive discounts to your social media followers that are only available if they sign up to become email subscribers. 

• This can work the other way round – you could prompt your email subscribers to follow you on Instagram for the chance to get a special discount or enter a game of chance draw. By reminding subscribers that your brand has an active social network, email marketing can help significantly in increasing your brand’s social media engagement.

• Add a sign-up link in your link inbio and post opt-in offers like discounts and freebies to your Instagram and Facebook Stories.

• Use your email contacts list to create lookalike audiences for your targeting campaigns on Facebook and other platforms. That way you know you’re targeting users who have similar interests to email segments who have recently opened your email.

Get Started With Email Marketing for Small Business

Email marketing can turn a small audience into an online community of loyal subscribers who are excited about the types of content and products provided by small businesses like yours. 

Just keep in mind how difficult it is to attract more customers and how competitive it can be, with so many online businesses competing for attention. Make sure your emails include high-quality and unique content that can’t be found anywhere else. 

Remember that the most effective email marketing strategies are always clear, targeted, and personalized.