Did you know, email marketing was voted by customers to be the preferred way to receive marketing material? If not, you do now! So, if your email marketing game isn’t up to scratch, you’ll want to read on to discover our top tips on email marketing for small businesses.
Make signing up easy
If you are a small business, building a legitimate mailing list can be a strenuous task. The first thing you’ll need to do is include a sign-up link on each page of your website. Wherever it may be: the footer, the navigation menu or slap bang in the middle of your home screen, just make sure it’s there. Once a potential customer clicks the link, don’t bore them with a huge signup form; unless it is absolutely necessary, just start off with their full name and email address. You’ll want to make it a quick and pain-free process to avoid them dropping off the sign-up funnel. More importantly, don’t stoop to using a purchased mailing list, not only is it illegal, it won’t work. You’ll end up causing damage to your domain’s reputation for measly results.
Mobile first
You may have heard that your website needs to be designed for mobile first. This remains true and extends to your emails as well. As you can imagine, most people will read your emails on their mobile device; we all have them connected to our personal and work email at LEAST! So, why log onto your computer? In fact, mobile-users (A.K.A, everyone), check their emails 3 x more than non-mobile users. For that reason, you’ll need to design your emails so that they’ll appear neat and professional on a small mobile screen. If not, statistics show that 80% of mobile-users will delete your email on arrival. To find out more about how to do optimize your emails for mobile use, check out the following post on “Top tips for optimizing emails for mobile devices“.
Use your customer’s name
“Dear Valued Customer,
It’s Black Friday and we thought you might like to see our latest offers on…”
Wait STOP! “Dear valued customer” just doesn’t cut it. Customers don’t like to be forgotten and more importantly, using your customer’s name will remind them that they have a valid connection with you and that your email isn’t spam. Even better, if you can add your customer’s name to the subject of your email, it could increase your open rates by 16%. Something so simple with great results.
Segment your audience and personalize content
Don’t make the rooky mistake of sending all types of promotional material to your entire mailing list. Depending on the nature of your company, you’ll want to analyze your customers in order to choose your tone and send them strategically. For example, who bought what type of product, age, gender and so on. If you don’t, you may risk your subscribers searching for that unsubscribe link after receiving non-relevant content (which would be a huge shame after all the hard work you’ve done so far).
Send transactional emails
To improve customer engagement, you should be sending transactional emails alongside your marketing emails. A quick “thank you for your purchase” or “you haven’t used your account in a while” can boost those open and click-through rates. In fact, they are known to raise your total revenue by 4%! To find out a little more about transactional emails and how/when they should be sent, check out the following post on Improve CX with transactional emails.
Include a call to action
When you think of a “call to action” you may immediately think that it needs to link to a purchase. Well, not necessarily! It is advisable to include a call to action in each email that you send. Whether it be “check out our new blog on…” or “see our website for more information on…” you’ll want to include these to improve website traffic and engagement.
Using a Smarthost
Now, there’s one thing building your mailing list, perfecting your content and designing your emails for mobiles first… and, there’s successfully delivering that email to your customer’s inbox. Outgoing servers (in regards to sending limits) and incoming servers (in regards to security) are getting stricter and stricter. Using a Smarthost such as SMTP2GO will eliminate delivery issues and get those emails to where they need to be, quickly and securely.
Not convinced? (Here comes my call to action) Try out SMTP2GO for free and forget about delivery! All you’ll need to do is focus on our top tips on email marketing for small businesses above. 😉
