Email marketing is as important for small businesses as big ones. Some would even go and argue that it’s more important for smaller ones. Working with a smaller marketing budget and little to no marketing team members can make email marketing a life saviour.

It’s a relatively easy and affordable way to sell more products and services to both your current and potential audience but mainly the former. And the thing is, you don’t even need to be a marketing professional to make this work.

In order to help you in your journey, we have put together a number of tips and tricks that you, a small business owner, should apply in order to have a successful email marketing campaign. Keep on reading for more.

1. Rely on personalised emails

Through emails, you have direct access to the inboxes of your audience. And it would be counterproductive if you abuse this access with sloppy content that has little to no value.

Your audience is quite diverse so sending them generic emails rarely hits. And the one true solution to this is personalisation. So, it should come as no surprise that the open rate for emails with personalisation is higher than those lacking it (Statista).

Most people who aren’t familiar with email marketing think of personalisation as adding your customer’s first name to the email. However, it’s much more than that. Emails can be personalised in numerous ways, including:

• Based on past interactions with your brand and business
• Purchase behaviour
• A user’s birthday
• And more

2. Small business email marketing tips: Segmentation

This is also one of the best small business email marketing tips you can follow.

In order for your emails to properly land, they need to be relevant to the people you’re sending them to. One way of achieving this is by dividing your audience into different groups based on common interests and traits.

Such a process, known as segmentation, is the way to go if you want to personalise your audience’s experience. With segmentation, marketers can send targeted emails to different portions of their audience.

Segmentation in its most basic form can rely on aspects such as:

• Location
• Where the user is in their buyer’s journey
• Past behaviour and site navigation
• Past purchases
• Job title
• Interests and hobbies

3. Write concise emails

Ask any established marketer with experience in email marketing about being concise and brief, and they’ll tell you that they are keys to success.

Breaking up your email into short paragraphs and bullets can help the reader to better scan the email and get an understanding of the most important points.

Generally speaking, it’s best to keep your marketing emails at the 500 words mark. Less than that is good. More than that, not so much.

4. Make use of visuals

Marketing emails shouldn’t just be a bunch of written text. You need to make use of graphics, pictures, or even a video if possible. We, humans, happen to process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. And such a significant number speaks volumes about the importance of visuals.

One thing to keep in mind is the users’ accessibility to these visuals on their mobile devices, which takes us to our next point.

5. Small business email marketing tips: Mobile-friendly emails

In 2019, mobile devices accounted for 42% of all email opens, and that number is only going to rise. This means that making your emails mobile-friendly and responsive should be a top priority.

The last thing you want is for your recipients to have a hard time reading your email on their phones or tablet. Thankfully for you, there are a plethora of tools out there that allow you to create responsive, mobile-friendly emails. These include Sendinblue, Constant Contact, SendPulse, and more.

Any average email tool with a drag and drop feature is sure to generate a responsive email. And if you happen to not use any, there are numerous templates that you can easily access online.

6. Use confirmed opt-in

No one wants their emails to be perceived as spam by their audience. And for that reason alone, we recommend that you use confirmed opt-in. Also known as double opt-in, this option helps to ensure that whoever you send your email to wants it in their inbox.

So basically, it goes as follows: someone signs up for your list, and you send them a double opt-in email. This email should contain a clickable button that they can use to confirm that indeed they want to receive your emails.

This tip might sound like an unnecessary process to put your customers through. However, it helps reduce the number of accidental sign-ups and can help you avoid any trouble when it comes to email marketing laws.

Plus, it helps keep your email list clean, which usually results in higher deliverability and engagement rates. You see, the quality of your email list is more important than the quantity. No one wants a list full of people who don’t want anything to do with them.

7. Use email automation

Sending the right email to the right people at the right time can be a tedious process. However, with email automation, such a feat is beyond easy.

For instance, in our previous point, we have dealt with opt-in confirmation emails. Such emails can only be properly sent through automation. This is because they are supposed to be instantaneous and tend to be repetitive, especially if you get many subscriptions in the same period of time.

Other email types that rely on automation include tracking ones. These emails can give the buyer updates about a product’s shipment.

But the most common type of automated email is welcome emails. These are sent out to newly subscribed users to welcome them into the tribe. They can also be a source of additional information for your recipients about your products, services, and overall brand.

8. Small business email marketing tips: Avoid no-reply addresses

It’s crucial that you have a reply address when sending out your marketing emails. This allows customers to respond to your emails if they ever feel like it. Without this, you’d be hindering the overall customer experience of your email campaign.

Moreover, no-reply emails tend to decrease deliverability because they can end up in the spam folders of your recipients. Even if they don’t end up there, the recipients themselves might mark them as spam.

So, instead of having the sender address of your marketing emails as noreply@domain.com, have it as customerservice@domain.com instead, for example.

But your task doesn’t end there. You shouldn’t neglect any incoming replies from curious subscribers. We recommend that you assign someone to actively check and manage the sender’s email address for any replies.

Such an approach helps you to solidify relationships with your subscribers, which takes us to our next point.

9. Nurture relationships

Email marketing isn’t exclusively about pushing people to make a purchase. It’s also about cultivating a relationship with them that can and will last for years.

In other words, the emails you send out should be focused on the customers and not on your own company. Try to offer solutions to your audience’s problems/pain points.

Make sure to highlight the benefits in your email copy, headlines, and CTAs (calls to action). Plus, make sure to send out helpful information, updates, deals, and reminders through your emails. Basically, anything that makes your customers feel special and appreciated for what they are.

Moreover, a healthy brand-costumer relationship goes both ways. So, you wouldn’t just tell your audience things. And you also have to ask them. Through polls and surveys, you can ask your audience what they want to see in future emails. That way, you can adapt your strategy to their needs which would definitely improve your engagement numbers. 

10. Test, test, test!

The last item on our list of the best small business email marketing tips is testing.

Without continuous testing of your emails, there’s no way to see any improvements. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the way to go in situations like these. It can help you get a clearer picture of what triggers a positive response from your audience and what doesn’t.

For a proper email split test, do the following:

• Determine what you want to test (subject lines, CTAs, tone, etc.)
• Only change one component in the email
• Get an idea of what the outcome might be
• Analyse the data that comes back from the test(s)

If your emails happen to get more engagement because you changed your subject line or moved the CTA button, then keep the changes. If that doesn’t happen, you can simply revert the changes and keep doing what you’re doing.

One piece of advice, though. Just because a test didn’t yield the expected positive results doesn’t mean you should stop testing. There are thousands of different variations that you can come up with, some of which might yield far better results than others!

We can handle email marketing for you

If you’re a small business owner, you probably have a lot on your plate. If you’re too busy and inexperienced to take care of email marketing yourself, get in touch with us today because we can do the heavy lifting for you.

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Small business email marketing tips – FAQs