Email marketing is often overlooked by small business owners worried it takes too much time and provides limited ROI. However, it remains a powerful digital marketing tool for permission-based communication that helps foster valuable customer relationships. Here we look at email marketing as a cost-effective tool for small business growth and increased marketing ROI.
Email Marketing and Revenue Growth
If you’re in doubt that email marketing will provide significant growth, consider this: 2027 projections for revenue generated via email marketing is $17.9 billion. If this doesn’t tell you how email marketing provides impressive ROI, we’re not sure what will. But what is driving such high numbers? Targeted messaging to qualified audiences. Because email is permission-based and allows you to personalize your messaging, you can see impressive results. Imagine what you can accomplish knowing that 77% of marketers are seeing increased email engagement. This, combined with high projected growth, is compelling evidence that email works.
Increasing Email Users
You might also worry that email users are dwindling, with more people looking to social media for all their answers and information. However, the number of daily email users continues to rise. With this expansion comes the opportunity to get more people on board and reach a broad and diverse audience willing to hear what you’ve got to say.
Again, because this is permission-based digital marketing, you’re speaking to an audience that wants to receive the type of personalized information only you can provide. As a result, you can build loyalty along every step of the customer journey.
A Smarter Growth Strategy
As a small business owner, you have limited time, budget, and resources. Therefore, you need a smarter growth strategy that is easier to execute and will see higher ROI. Email marketing is the fastest and easiest way to create targeted marketing at a granular level to make far more meaningful connections. As a business strategy, you save time and can leverage automated email platforms to remain in step with customers to increase conversions by giving the people what they want. You can both nurture leads and leverage existing relationships using email marketing.
A Measurable Tactic
We get you want a measurable digital marketing strategy that shows you results. You can easily measure email success based on:
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- Conversion rates
- Bounce rates
- Forward and sharing rates
- Unsubscribe rates
- List growth rate
- Overall ROI
You can also monitor for threats that can ruin your email strategy, such as spam complaint rates. As a result, you can constantly improve your email strategy through A/B testing and content-based performance to see increasingly better results and ROI. Back to statistics, remember 77% of marketers saw an increase in email engagement, reflecting a desire for customers to receive communication through email.
How to Prepare a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
There are many moving parts to email marketing. To ace your email marketing campaigns, you need to focus on the following:
Subscriber Segmentation
Creating segments based on buying behavior, demographics or past engagement allows you to create highly targeted, personalized emails that will boost engagement and conversion rates. You need to understand your audience so you can meet their needs, resolve their pain points, and leverage their habits to see more success.
Personalization
Using data to drive personalization ensures your customers receive relevant, meaningful, and helpful information based on their preferences and needs. You can also use cues from past behavior to become better at understanding what customers want, such as using past purchases to make product recommendations, or to share a tip on how to make the most of a purchase. Remember, it’s not always about purchases. Emails based on milestones such as the date of their first purchase, a birthday, or subscription deadlines also offer opportunities to foster your relationships through personalization.
Automation
As a small business, you need to optimize efficiency using automation. Tools can be used to limit manual work and blast out emails based on certain schedules and campaigns. Typical automation would apply to triggers such as:
- Welcoming new subscribers
- Thanking customers for purchases
- Asking for reviews of products or services
- Customer journey triggers such as requesting information, filling out a form, making a review, etc.
- Follow-up emails
- Abandoned shopping cart reminders
- Promotional emails to help encourage inactive subscribers to return to the fold
Subject Lines
This can prove to be the most difficult and most important email element. You need to attract interest quickly to get subscribers to take that all important first step and open email. Your subject line should attempt to accomplish one or a combination of the following:
- Creating a sense of urgency
- Peaking curiosity
- Making an irresistible offer
- Using personalization
- Getting a chuckle with humor, wit or something a little quirky
Just keep in mind you have to reflect your brand so customers know it’s from you and you don’t create a disconnect or sense of confusion. Here are a few tips to perfect your subject lines:
- Make it clear what people can get when they open your email
- Don’t get too wordy trying to be clever
- Include the subscriber’s name
- Avoid spam triggers such as Limited Time, Congratulations, Apply/Call Now, Click here
- Never use high-converting email subject lines from another brand as your own
A/B Testing
From the colors you use to your subject line and your offers to your calls to action, A/B testing allows you to get insights about what elements of your emails work best on a granular level. Even your send times can impact performance. Testing will provide insights to inform your marketing decisions and create increasingly more engaging and higher-converting emails.
Build Subscribers
There are different ways to build your email list, including:
- Calls to action on blogs to fill out a subscription form
- Point of sale, either in-store or online
- Social media
- Contests
As a permission-based marketing tactic, you need to confirm a subscriber agrees to receive your email and provide an unsubscribe option on every email you send.
Content and Design
Your email needs intriguing content and compelling visuals to engage your subscribers. You want to limit unsubscribes by sharing valuable information and getting to the point of your main message quickly. As mentioned, personalization helps, as does sharing relevant information based on customer segments. A strong, branded design helps build trust while making it easier for subscribers to get the gist of the message at a glance with a prominent call to action.
CTA
Your call to action (CAT) is critical to your email success. It needs to be clear with a live link that allows readers to quickly seek more information. You have to entice them in a few words with compelling words that make it difficult to resist. Your calls to action should have a specific purpose, such as Get Your Offer Here, so subscribers can help you meet a specific marketing goal. It helps to understand your goals based on whether they are promotional, relational, or transactional to help fine-tune your CTAs:
- Promotional: Link to a product page or coupon
- Relational: Link to a recent blog post or tutorial
- Transactional: Link to a transaction, proof of order, tracking page, etc.
A compelling, targeted CTA increases campaign success while providing a measurable link for monitoring purposes.
How to Launch Your Email Campaign
Once your email campaign is ready, you need to time when you launch to help improve open rates. According to HubSpot, the highest email engagement times are between 9 AM to 12 PM and 12 PM to 3 PM on a Tuesday. To confirm your timing is right and to track your testing, you need to monitor your marketing metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and conversion rates.
Compare performance at different times and days to help fine-tune your launch times. Your monitoring should also focus on finding trends and patterns that indicate the success and failures of your campaigns so you can strengthen future campaigns. Success should also be measured against your campaign goals, such as:
- Boosting engagement with your content
- Nurturing existing subscribers
- Re-engaging inactive subscribers
- Segmentation performance
- Completing purchases on abandoned carts
You can use technology to launch your campaigns using platforms that allow you to:
- Leverage drag-and-drop templates
- Automate workflows
- Integrate with software like WordPress
- Access segmentation tools
- Manage lists and use unsubscribe filters to remain compliant
- Access analytics
- Schedule launch dates
Email marketing is a proven, cost-effective digital marketing tactic with a high ROI. You can use this as a tool to enhance your marketing strategy and take advantage of personalization to reach your customers in more meaningful ways. You can fine-tune your emails and see improved performance by leveraging results-driven strategies such as segmentation, personalization, and A/B testing.
You can also reduce the pressure on your team by leveraging tools like email automation to reach your customer base. Although all this information might feel like way too much work, starting to build a comprehensive subscriber base will provide you with a growing number of segments you can target with engaging subject lines, compelling content and personalized offers that increase customer engagement, experience, and satisfaction to positively impact sales.
Unlock email marketing success! Schedule a consultation to supercharge your small business growth.