Email marketing is just as crucial as it's ever been for successful businesses. With more than four million users today and that number expected to grow, email has enormous reach. It's also highly cost-effective and often yields a high return on investment, with the average campaign earning $36 for every dollar spent. If your emails aren't seeing a similar ROI, you're likely missing out on some best practices. Email marketing for small businesses is necessary, making it important to implement it properly.
To help you get the most from your email campaigns, the following are some tips from the email marketing experts at Mid-West Family Eau Claire.
Understand Its Primary Goals
Before diving into our email marketing tips, it's important to know the three main aspects of email marketing. These will guide your campaigns.
Deliverability
The deliverability of your emails is the ability for you to connect successfully with email recipients. Good deliverability will help you avoid landing in spam folders and ensure you're effectively reaching the people who are most likely to become customers.
Open Rates
Your email's open rate is the rate at which recipients open your emails. A solid subject line and appropriate timing can help increase this metric.
Conversion Rates
The conversion rate indicates how many people are performing the desired action in your emails after opening them. You can increase this rate in several ways as you optimize email content.
With a better understanding of these core elements, you can take the necessary steps to get the results you want from email marketing for small businesses.
Improving Deliverability
There are a few ways to increase each email's deliverability. These include:
1. Use Double Opt-Ins
Single opt-ins only require email users to subscribe once before receiving emails. One potential downside to this strategy is low-quality leads. Meanwhile, double opt-ins ask users to subscribe and confirm their subscription via email, securing more committed leads.
While double opt-ins may mean fewer leads, the leads you do attract will be less likely to report your emails as spam. This is crucial because internet service providers (ISPs) will block sending servers if they get too many spam reports, essentially blacklisting your business from sending emails.
2. Do Occasional List Purges
Over time, certain people on your email list may grow disinterested in your emails, or they may simply become inactive. This makes it important to perform periodic list purges that remove inactive recipients. Not only will this ensure your emails go to active recipients who are more responsive, but it will also help reduce hard bounces that could otherwise lead ISPs to block your IP.
3. Make Opt-Out Easy
While you may want to minimize the number of opt-outs your campaigns receive, you need to enable people to easily unsubscribe as needed. If recipients don't see how they can unsubscribe, they may simply mark your emails as spam and subsequently hurt deliverability. To keep opt-out simple, include a clearly labeled "Unsubscribe" button at the bottom of your emails.
Improving Open Rates
The following strategies can boost open rates for your emails:
4. Experiment with A/B Testing
A/B split testing involves using two versions of an email or another piece of content with one element changed. The goal is to see which performs better among recipients. You can conduct these tests with small segments of your audience before launching a larger campaign.
For example, if you want to increase your open rate, you might have two different emails with the same content, call-to-action (CTA), and visuals, but another subject line. You would then measure the results of this campaign to see which subject line gets the best response, ultimately leading you to use the one with the best performance.
5. Find the Timing Sweet Spot
People will be more likely to open your emails on specific days and at specific times when they're most active. You can improve your open rate if you time your emails just right. Find out when your audiences use email most often and send your emails at these times on a set schedule.
6. Segment Your Audience
Segmentation entails breaking your audience into different groups. To segment your audiences, you would develop different target personas that represent each segment. You can create target personas based on demographics, behaviors, times when different segments are most active on email, and other data. You can then tailor your campaigns to reach each segment with the appropriate timing and engaging subject lines.
Improving Conversion Rates
If your goal is to get more conversions, you can take these steps:
7. Always Include a Call to Action
A call-to-action, or CTA, is a specific action you want your email recipients to take after reading your emails. In many cases, CTAs lead back to your website and encourage people to engage more with your brand or make a purchase.
When developing strategies for email marketing for small businesses, strong CTAs are integral. Your CTAs should be clear and avoid any vague language that could reduce conversions. Ensure that recipients know exactly what they're getting when they perform each action.
8. Include Personalization
People also respond to personalization across all marketing campaigns, email included. You can use personalization in your emails in a few different ways. For instance, you could set up a template for email content and subject lines that address each recipient by name. You could also create different types of content based on the various touchpoints people use to initially subscribe to your emails.
9. Set Up Automated Email Campaigns
Email recipients may not respond to your emails with the first piece of content they receive in their inboxes. If you want to increase responsiveness, consider setting up automated drip email campaigns. These would automatically send emails to recipients after a period if they don't convert with the first email.
Balance is important here—avoid sending your emails too often or people may be quick to mark your emails as spam.
Improving Deliverability, Open Rates, and Conversion Rates
You can improve all three key elements of your email campaigns by taking the following step:
10. Partner with Mid-West Family Eau Claire
To get the best results with email marketing for small businesses, turn to the team at Mid-West Family Eau Claire. We employ experts in email marketing who know how to craft the perfect campaigns based on your goals and needs. We specialize in small businesses in the Eau Claire area. Get a free website analysis today to discover what we can do for your business. You can also contact us for more information about our email marketing services.
