Finding cheap and effective ways to market your small business is essential to its ability to grow into a strong and respected brand. From content marketing to PPC, there are many great ways for your company to increase its visibility online. Perhaps one of the greatest ways, however, is a technology we use every single day: email.
Did you know that over 210 billion emails are sent out day after day? Additionally, almost everybody in the United States currently has an email address. With the frequency and size of the audience, email makes a perfect platform for engaging with customers on a daily basis.
Customers also prefer email to many other online marketing methods. Recently, one study showed that an impressive 48% of customers surveyed preferred email marketing to other brand communications strategies. With the affordability, ease, and customer approved nature of email marketing, you would be foolish not to give it a shot.
If you are new to email marketing, it will be useful to educate yourself on a few tips for optimizing your email marketing practices. Here are 5 essentials every small business involved in an email marketing strategy should be aware of:
1. Send Valuable Content
Providing relevant and valuable content to your customer is a great way to keep their interest. For example, if you were a company specializing in juicing machines, a useful guide to juice recipes would easily catch your customers’ eyes.
Implementing strategies such as online surveys is a great way to ensure you are providing the kind of content your audience craves. Remember, you have many competitors no matter what industry you’re in, so it’s important to make every interaction you have with a customer excellent.
2. Constantly Build Your Email List
Before you can benefit from email marketing, you will need a strong base of customer emails to reach out to. Make sure to provide benefits or coupons to anyone who is willing to give their email contact information. If someone is willing to give their email, they are almost certainly interested in your product, so giving them an extra incentive such as a coupon to check out your business will help you close a sale.
Doing this helps to build positive expectations about your brand within the customer’s mind. Once they have given their permission to be marketed to by signing up for your email list, you can market to them openly without feeling intrusive. In this way, email marketing provides a highly ethical approach to growing your company’s brand.
3. Always Present Emails Professionally
Although you certainly want to give your content a fun and engaging flair, keeping the presentation professional is of utmost importance. If the format of an email is not intuitive to read, or photos and other content take forever to load, customers are likely to lose interest before ever truly experiencing the message you are extending to them.
One of the most important things to remember when thinking about the presentation of your emails is how they look on both desktop and mobile platforms. More than ever, people are using both of these sorts of devices evenly, so making sure an email can be experienced the same either way is essential to its success. If your emails are simply unreadable on mobile devices, you will simply fail at your email marketing attempt altogether.
4. Include Strong Call to Actions
While educating your audience about your product and providing great content is important, you ultimately want email interactions to lead to a sale. Providing strong, specific call to actions inside of your emails can help impact the amount of customers who not only visit your site, but eventually make a purchase. Offering deals on a product by following a link in an email is a great example of how to achieve an effective call to action.
Extending call to actions that are time-sensitive and have offer end-dates can help increase your ability to close a sale as well. If a deal seems urgent, customers are more likely to be impulsive and spontaneous about their purchasing decisions.
5. Keep Your Subject Lines Simple & Strong
To benefit from your finely crafted email marketing campaign, you will first need your customer base to actually open your content. Having a strong subject line that entices the reader to open an email is important. Try and think of a way to build a subject line that communicates both the main topic and any potential deals within a single, short sentence.
By following these simple five steps, you will be able to effectively start your journey towards effective email marketing. You likely already have at least the beginnings of an email lists for your company, so start aggressively expanding that list today to gain the maximum amount of benefits possible from your campaign. Check out our blog at WPamplify to learn about more ways to optimize marketing practices for you small business.
