It’s not an understatement to say that email marketing is the king of marketing. Email marketing is cost-effective and gives better ROI than other marketing channels in the market. Every dollar spent on email marketing gives you $42 ROI, and that’s exactly what you need for a small business: less investment and higher returns.
Small Business Email Marketing Strategy & Tips for 2022 Share on X
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is nothing more than email marketing, but it is much more than that. Email marketing is non-invasive and helps build a solid relationship with your subscribers. Email marketing has been consistently growing to suit the time. For example, in the 1970s, email marketing was considered nothing more than spam dumped in your inbox, or it could contain phishing emails.
However, ISPs have grown smarter over the years, and ESPs have adapted to the compliances to become less spammy and more targeted.
Email marketing that is done right is a win-win situation where both the sender and the subscribers benefit from the shared content. To build a strong relationship with your subscribers, you need to form a solid foundation, communicate regularly, be informative, send them content they want to read, attract them with the right design, analyze your email campaign’s performance, and gain trust in your brand.
You can use email marketing to:
- Generate leads
- Communicate with customers
- Improve brand awareness
- Increase ROI
- Know what your audience needs
Must-Know Email Marketing Strategies to Kick Start Your Small Business
1. Build Your Email List
Building a valid email list is crucial to any small business; never be tempted to buy email lists. Always choose double opt-in to allow people to subscribe to your email list voluntarily. This will help you get interested subscribers and help you lower spam complaints and ultimately avoid getting blacklisted by ISPs.
The fastest way to build your email list is to use sign-up forms and place them on your website, blogs, and social media. Make it easier for them to sign up for your email list, and don’t complicate it with long processes. Just ask for their name and their valid email address.
Pro-tips:
- Double opt-in should be a norm.
- Clean your email list once in 6 months.
- Request your existing active subscribers to opt-in again
- Give them an unsubscribe link in emails
2. Attract Them With Email Design And Valuable Content
Don’t be intimidated by designing your emails, a good email marketing software like BayEngage will have pre-built email templates with a drag and drop editor.
Don’t complicate email designs with too many images and design elements. The key is to keep 40% design element and 60% content. And there are downsides to stuffing your emails with design elements; sometimes, people’s internet connectivity might be slow, and the images might not even appear on their screen. This will risk your email being mistaken for spam.
So, keep it light and simple!
Pro-tip:
- A/B test your email designs.
- Your email design should align with your brand’s voice and color.
- Keep the CTA at the right place to get more conversions.
After email design, it all boils down to the content. It doesn’t matter whether you have the best email design or not; if you fail to offer valuable content to your subscribers, your email campaign will fail to succeed.
So segment your audience based on their online behavior, purchase history, age, gender, and other criteria. Later, send personalized content that will add some value to their life. It could be a gift guide, an Ebook, video, blogs, offers, or coupon codes.
3. Analyze Your Email Campaign’s Performance
This is a significant factor for any successful email campaign. Analyze the results for your email campaigns every time and learn from your mistakes. Unlike other marketing channels, email marketing gives you the leeway of knowing the nuances in metrics.
Here are a couple of metrics you should utilize to improve:
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- Conversion rates
- Bounce rates
- Spam rates
- Unsubscribe rates
- Overall ROI
Small Business Email Marketing Tips for 2022
1. Choose Email Deliverability Over Others
With new email updates from ioS, businesses have started to worry about email deliverability and spam traps.
To improve email deliverability,
you should exclude all contacts from the affected domains from your regular email marketing campaigns and create a different approach for those subscribers.
Ask yourself these questions:
Are you sending a lot of emails to inactive subscribers in that domain?
Are you receiving a lot of bounces from that domain?
Do you have any complaints from that domain?
If you answered yes to any, prepare a strategy to combat this.
And there are several reasons why spam traps are triggered:
- You do not use double opt-in.
- You attempt to send to an old email list.
- You don’t regularly clean out your database of bounces and inactive subscribers.
- You purchase email lists.
Avoid making the above mistakes and improve your email deliverability rate with ease!
2. Are Your Emails Mobile-friendly?
Most people view emails using their smartphones these days. And it should be your top priority to make your email campaigns mobile-friendly. Your email templates and designs should be optimized for the users’ screen, a PC, smartphone, or tablet.
Fortunately, many Email Service Providers like BayEngage give you mobile-responsive email templates. You don’t need to know any coding to create responsive emails anymore, and if you are an advanced email marketer, you will have access to upload HTML codes to create your emails.
3. Segment, Segment, Segment!
Segmentation is what makes email marketing non-invasive. It allows you to send content based on what the subscribers want. So, never fail to make use of this email marketing feature. Segment your email list based on different criteria: age, gender, profession, interests, online behavior, purchase history, and others. Narrow it down as much as possible to understand your audience better.
Segmenting your audience will allow you to personalize the content and design. And a highly personalized email is a sure-fire way to a successful email campaign.
4. Automate Your Emails
Don’t stress over sending emails every day manually. Use email automation to set email workflow and cover all customer journeys. When you automate your emails, it will automatically be triggered when a potential customer takes an action on your website.
You can also set time intervals between your automated emails to avoid being marked as spam.
If a website visitor abandons their cart after adding products, you can send a series of abandoned cart emails at different time intervals.
And, when a customer places an order, you can use order confirmation email templates and automate them to be sent within 5 minutes of placing the order.
These kinds of automated emails not only save time and energy and nudge the website visitor to come back to your store for more.
So, now you know what you need to know to kick start email marketing for your small business in 2022; make use of all these strategies and tips to keep improving your email campaigns and become a success!
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General FAQs
When utilized properly, email has a huge role to play in creating lasting, profitable relationships between small businesses and customers. Email is considered the most critical factor in marketing success by over 40% of B2B marketers. 80% of business professionals consider email a vital aspect in customer retention.
More importantly, email marketing allows you to build relationships with leads, customers and past customers. It’s your opportunity to speak directly to them in their inbox, at a time that is convenient for them. Coupled with the right messaging, email can become one of your most impactful marketing channels.
Communicating by email is almost instantaneous, which enhances communications by quickly disseminating information and providing fast response to customer inquiries. It also allows for quicker problem-solving and more streamlined business processes.
