By Jericho Gonzales
As a a small business owner, you don’t exactly have unlimited marketing resources or capital. This is why you need a cost-effective marketing tool that can help you build your brand, reach more people, and of course drive your revenue. This is where email marketing comes in.
While other digital marketing channels can also be useful, email marketing is a proven strategy for achieving your business goals, whether it’s fostering better relationships with your customers, letting more people know about your business, or boosting your ROI.
Whether you’re operating a new business and want to get the word out to people or you are looking for ways to revamp your existing strategy, here are four best practices you need to follow.
Build your list
If you own a small business, building your list should be your top priority. After all, you can’t send emails if you have no one to send them to.
Give visitors plenty of opportunities to become subscribers by placing multiple CTAs throughout various pages of your website such as the homepage, products and services page, and blog.
Make your CTAs highly visible so that your visitors don’t miss them. Prompt visitors to sign up to your list by using language like “Join Today”, “Become a Member” or “Join Our Community”.
Welcome new subscribers
Start your relationship with new subscribers the right way by sending them welcome emails. Doing so lets you achieve two things: 1) you foster loyalty from your subscribers by immediately making them feel valued, and 2) you make an excellent first impression.
Research suggests that welcome emails generate 320% more revenue per email than other types of emails, so use your welcome emails as opportunities to boost your sales. In your welcome message, include an exclusive discount or offer in order to entice your new subscribers into making their first purchase.
Get the word out
Small businesses don’t have the kind of marketing budget that bigger, more established organizations do. Therefore, the number of people you can reach is lower than, say, a Fortune 500 company that spends millions of dollars on marketing.
You shouldn’t think of this as a roadblock, though. Through email marketing, you can still gather plenty of prospects with only a little effort—as long as you do it properly.
Say you’ve already built a small list of subscribers. It’s now time for you to grow that list. What you can do is send an email to your existing subscribers asking them to refer their friends or colleagues. Make it worth your subscribers’ while by offering them a discount on their next purchase after their referrals also make a successful purchase. Then, you can also offer these referrals discounts on their first purchases. This not only increases your chances of growing your list, but drives your revenue as well.
Automate your emails
You most likely have your hands full running your business day in and day out, which means you have little time for anything else. This makes automating your emails necessary. When you automate your emails, you can focus on what you do best—growing your business.
With automation, you can send your messages in seconds, unlike manual email sending that might take up your entire day. Email marketing automation also enables you to schedule your emails, which will ensure that you are sending timely and relevant content to your subscribers.
Wrap up
The specifics of your email marketing strategy will still depend on things like the products or services you offer and your marketing budget, but you should keep these best practices in mind regardless. They’re a great place to start when thinking about email marketing because they are effective across all sorts of email marketing strategies.
Jericho Gonzales is a Content Marketing Specialist at Campaign Monitor. After seven years of feeling empty and dissatisfied with his career in the financial industry, he decided to follow his dreams and become a writer. When not busy with wordcraft, he immerses himself in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction, whether it be in the form of novels, video games, or movies.
Email marketing stock photo by thodonal88/Shutterstock
