A common misconception among Beginners & small business owners is that email marketing is inefficient and email is only for large companies. This is just not true! The most profitable online marketing strategy with 4400% ROI is email marketing. The good news is, this huge ROI is not a privilege of big players. Instead, small businesses can make significant profits from email marketing.
With email, we can do business with anyone in the world in minutes. Businesses have many opportunities to reach new audiences using email, with 3.9 billion email addresses worldwide providing plenty of opportunities for businesses. When used properly, email plays a key role in building fruitful and lasting relationships between small businesses and their customers.
Over 40% of B2B marketers believe that email marketing is the most important part of their marketing strategy. More than 80% of entrepreneurs consider email to be an important tool for customer retention. As a result, when used properly, email marketing offers the best ROI for any channel, reaching $ 53 for every dollar spent in 2021. The results do not stop there. In addition, 72% of users rank email as their preferred marketing method.
There are benefits to every marketing channel. It’s easy to see how many likes and shares a social media post gets in real-time, but print and broadcast marketing is also powerful. But over the decade email has consistently proven to be very effective.
We have created a quick guide to explain what email marketing is, why it is useful and how it can help businesses.
Table of Contents
Precisely what is Email Marketing?
As the name suggests, email marketing is just email marketing. However, it goes further. The goal of an effective email campaign is to build relationships.
Email marketing can be bad. We all saw it. Look in your spam folder. Clickbyte, phishing, and pop-ups that fill the screen with messy content are bad email marketing. Email marketing has a bad reputation for this type of content, but companies that specialize in email marketing have more effective strategies.
Advanced email marketing aims to engage customers and brands in a two-way conversation. To achieve long-term success, content must be shared more than once and sales must be generated. You need to get subscribers, get to know them, communicate with them, address their concerns, update them, evaluate your performance and stay in touch with your audience in general.
Why is email marketing so useful?
An email has many uses. When you design an email campaign well, you can achieve a lot and say a lot. You can go to customers’ inboxes and send the content you want as long as their interest continues. Internet marketing offers the unprecedented capability for relationship building and a wider customer base.
What is the benefit of email marketing for your business?
With email marketing, you can reach more audiences, increase loyalty and earn tons of revenue with a small investment. This is one of the reasons why email marketing is so popular.
Your business will also grow with email if you know about your audience. If you do not speak face to face with your customers, email is the closest thing to a direct conversation. Email allows you to gather useful data about your campaigns from the controlled testing pool, but personal conversations are resource-intensive, unpredictable, and infrequent. In the modern age, email marketing statistics are easily collected, measured, and analyzed. In the audience, you can track openings, clicks, and engagement.
What does this mean? Unless you can reproduce and improve good performance, it’s nothing. Many campaigns depend on the context. As long as you have the right data to work with, most success can be measured and replicated.
By using email, you receive valuable information about your campaigns, customers, and your competitors. Your email marketing campaigns not only help you build and maintain valuable customer relationships, provide the best ROI for your business and provide you with the brand that puts you ahead of the competition, but also keep you at the top of the trends. And keeps you in touch with your customers.
8 Actionable Email Marketing Tips For Beginners & Small Businesses
And now? Since you know how to create an email marketing strategy for your small business & as a beginner too, what is the next step? However, improve your results!
effective email campaigns. Your email marketing strategy should always look for new email marketing tips that can unlock the true potential of your email campaigns.
It will be difficult for marketers to get into the inbox in 2022. The number of businesses and competitors sending email requests to your contacts is growing. Therefore, it becomes more difficult to attract attention.
Here are 8 tips to help beginners & small businesses improve their email marketing to overcome inbox competition in 2022.
#1. The right software
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Here it is worth comparing different solutions. Different providers vary greatly in price, functionality, and reliability. You should definitely consider these factors:
Price per sent email: Price often drops with high shipping volumes.
Price pattern: Billing is based on the number of emails sent or the number of recipients. Both prepaid and subscription models are common for payments.
Shipping capacity: The number of emails the provider sends per hour should be as large as possible.
For Orientation: Newsletter 2Go sends 3 million emails per hour to each subscriber. Additionally, provider servers must be whitelisted to receive emails.
For example, if you are using software from the United States, the security of the data received is not guaranteed, so you can quickly commit a crime without noticing it.
#2. Create a recipient list
Without a list of recipients, e-mail marketing can be very frustrating. After all, you want to send your newsletter to someone. It is tempting to write only to existing contacts or, for example, people who have left their contact details in the competition. However, this is not always possible: Advertising newsletters are only allowed to be sent if the recipients have already given their consent.
This consent statement can be obtained, for example, during the ordering process or when registering for a newsletter using the double-opt-in registration form. When importing existing contacts, for example from an Excel list, things can get a little complicated. You will also be safe if you send them a confirmation e-mail and receive the required consent before sending the first newsletter. Some newsletters offer the option of automatically sending a double opt-in email directly when importing the contact list.
#3. Personalize it
“Dear customer” or “Good morning, music lover!” Nothing screams more spam or email than a simple greeting! “Hello, John!” Replace with Or “Jane, check it out!”
Automatically draws their attention without having to address the name of your prospect. Depending on the size of the contact database, you can also customize the email content to include information about the recipient:
- Gender
- Age
- Occupation
- Position
- Company name
These small additional improvements will give your email a more human note and help make your message more relevant than a cyber “cold call”.
#4. Use images
As mentioned above, images are essential for your copy to be concise and easy to digest, but they can also be the difference between a really attractive email and a wash-out email.
90% of the communication in the brain is visualized and images are processed 60,000 times faster than plain text. In order to transmit your message effectively, you need to take advantage of this connection by enhancing your high-quality branded imagery copy.
Try to include some of these visual elements in your next email:
- Image
- Graphics
- Video (or thumbnail link of the video)
- gif
- Emoji
- Header
- Badge
Remember, every audience is different, so get to know your buyer’s persona and test each visual element to find out what is most effective.
#5. Segment List Recipient
The purpose of most email marketing is not just to send a message, but to request an action (such as clicking on your website, purchasing, filling out a form, etc.)
To receive this type of active response, your message must resonate with the recipient. It should be relevant to your needs and situation and your interest. After all, no one cares for what no one cares about, right?
The easiest way to increase relevance and improve your email response is to target and segment contacts into different groups based on specific features or activities.
You’ll not send the same email to the B2B prospect who first visited your site you’ve talked to, right?
With more broken lists, it becomes easier not to do this.
Instead of “revealing” anything to the whole list, you can choose what makes sense for a suspicious email (or frame the same message in different ways depending on the interests of that list). )
Use the information in the database to segment your contacts into different groups. Your listings may be based on:
- Age
- Position
- Job Title
- Industry
- Site activity (for example, downloaded offers, visited pages, etc.)
- Position in the sales funnel
- Material
#6. Add a membership form instead of linking to your website
Many websites still ask people for their email addresses when they want to sign up for their newsletter. Instead of using the link, why not embed the form directly on your website?
You can increase your Newsletter subscription fee by 20 - 50% by replacing the link with the subscription form! Why? You are saving your website visitors time and effort by replacing the link with an activation form. Bottom line: Make your registration process as simple and convenient as possible.
#7. Simplifying the Sign-up process
When it comes to sign-up forms, make sure your customers are given as many opportunities as possible to sign up for your email.
Here’s our best email marketing tip: When appropriate, display the email signup form on your website. Your homepage, contact page, and footer must have a registration CTA.
On your e-commerce store checkout page, make sure customers receive emails when they submit their email addresses to complete their orders.
#8. Create an optimized email for purchases and optimize for mobile devices
If you want to reach more than 50% of Americans, you need to convert your email to mobile-friendly. You can not escape it in 2022. Your email design needs to be “responsive” to the screen type (desktop, tablet, or mobile) your reader is using and displayed appropriately so that the experience is as positive as possible.
The last thing you want is for members who are struggling to read your emails. These days, it is easy for consumers to lose faith in a brand with only one negative experience. If you use a tool like Active campaign that comes with a drag and drop email design tool, you can create professional emails that look amazing on all devices.
Additionally, people use their phones to shop as well as read emails. Make sure you have optimized your email for mobile conversions by linking to mobile-optimized web pages.
Bonus tip for beginners and small businesses
Make sure your small business email is automated in 2022. You can save a lot of time by automating email and establishing a better relationship with your customers.
My personal favorite try active campaign for free.
If you send regular newsletters, you should automatically send a welcome email to new subscribers. Doing these steps will help you to build their trust and build a strong relationship with them.
You can send automated emails to contacts based on their past behavior. Make sure your customers are happy with their purchase by asking about their favorite items or complementary items.
Sending the first newsletter - what should you focus on?
You have found the right email marketing software, created a list of your recipients, written content related to the target group, and created an attractive newsletter. Now the first e-mail can be sent. You must remember this:
Time to deliver: Both the time and day of sending should correspond to the relevant target group. For example, it will be easier to reach B2B customers between 9 am and 6 pm. Monday through Friday, with more end customers on weekends and evenings. However, the exact shipping time may be different for everyone. Try for yourself which time works best for you.
Sender and subject: This is information that the recipient should look at and explain before opening the e-mail. Choose a trusted recipient, preferably an original name and a meaningful subject. For tips on topic length, see this informative post.
Mobile-optimized performance: Experience shows that more than half of e-mails are already read on mobile devices. That’s why you also need to optimize newsletters for mobile display. Many email marketing tools provide responsive design templates for this purpose. The display will automatically adapt to the final device.
Recipient group: Sending an e-mail to all available recipients only makes sense in some cases. Emails designed to fit a specific target group are highly effective. To do this, you select recipients from your mailing list who apply specific features (gender, customer status, etc.). You can use all the information stored in your mailing list for target group selection.
Test: Before you send newsletters to all recipients, you should definitely do some testing. First, you need to send yourself a test mailing to check the presentation. You should also check all the links. If possible, spam testing may also be helpful. This allows you to anticipate how much the newsletter will be interrupted by spam filters.
To display or show: Is the shipping time accurate? Are the sender and subject compatible with the target group? Is the display safe on mobile devices? Did you choose the right recipients and test everything? Then you can get started - send immediately or predict mailing at the desired time in the future.
Evaluation & Optimization
However, successful e-mail marketing involves not only sending effective newsletters but also monitoring success and continuous optimization. This involves the use of email marketing software with integrated tracking so that critical important statistics such as delivery rate, opening rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, and conversion rate can be collected and evaluated.
These KPIs can provide information about whether you are properly addressing the target group and how well the newsletter content is received. Collecting numbers alone is only half the battle. You should use them and identify the need for optimization in your own email marketing. Then you can improve performance step by step and develop e-mail marketing as a very effective marketing tool. The infographic on the right shows what optimizations can be used if a key person is not satisfied.
The bottom line
E-mail marketing is a standard part of the online marketing mix and offers a wide range of opportunities. Prerequisites are the use of a powerful and legally secure e-mail marketing tool, such as content group-specific content and basic knowledge of technology, design, and usage. Once these are done, almost everyone can use e-mail marketing capability and see for themselves how little effort is required to achieve success quickly.
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