As a small business owner you hopefully understand how important it is to get your brand to stick out in your target audience’s minds. Running an engaging and compelling email marketing campaign is one of the best ways to go about doing this. In fact, the return on investment that comes from email is remarkably high compared to other forms of advertising due to the fact that once you build a healthy list you can reach the recipients, again and again, ultimately for free.
Research shows that for every dollar spent on email marketing you can expect to see an average return of roughly thirty-eight dollars. 80% of professionals state email marketing as the driving force behind their customer acquisition and retention. Digital marketing is best used to create brand awareness and email marketing campaigns help to convert a brands fans into paying customers.
Get ahead of your competition by following these 5 smart email marketing tips to grow your list.
1) Subscribing & Unsubscribing Should Be Easy.
A surprising number of small business owners who send out regular newsletters to their email list fail to have a subscription form in plain sight on the front page of their website. If it’s not on the first page it might as well be on your competitor’s site!
Making it difficult for website visitors to subscribe to your list results in missed opportunities of subscribers whom could easily become potential customers.
Keep in mind that “less is more” when it comes to subscription forms. People want it to be easy to subscribe to a list and this is easily accomplished by using a simple form that only asks for their name and email in exchange for something of value.
On the other side of the coin, you also want to make sure it is just as easy to unsubscribe from newsletters as well.
Avoid receiving angry emails and social media messages by having an unsubscribe link placed in a clearly visible spot in footer of each email you send out. If your email lacks an unsubscribe link and your email start getting marked as spam, it will damage the credibility of your email address making all your future emails arriving in peoples spam folders.
2) Remain Consistent Across All Channels.
Consistency is a critical part of branding which is why it’s important for your email newsletters to possess an identical look and feel as your website, social media accounts, and other marketing channels.
It’s best to have a customized email newsletter template that is completely unique to you and your brand. Your subscribers may get confused if they receive an email that looks like it has absolutely nothing to do with the website they subscribed to.
You want your content to be easily digestible while still being engaging and consistent with the tone and voice that is used throughout your website and social media accounts.
Keep your content short and to the point and broken up with spaces and even a few eye-catching images. Your readers do not want to sit there and read through block after block of text, mix it up!
3) Optimize For Different Devices
According to litmus, more emails are read on mobile devices than they are on desktop computers. In fact, statistics show over 75% of emails are read on mobile devices alone.
If you don’t optimize your email campaigns to be appealing and digestible across multiple devices you stand to miss out on new website visitors, new customers, and repeat business from your email campaign efforts. You could have the most informative, best looking email campaign in the world but it won’t do you any good if people aren’t reading it because it fails to look right on their phones.
Additionally, take advantage of business texting services and incorporate them into your email campaigns. Mobile engagement plays a pivotal role in small business and utilizing sms, which the most popular form of communication, and an excellent way to generate qualified and targeted leads.
Businesses are given a unique local number that is able to send and receive texts from an online account. These texts are sent and received in real-time so you never miss out on conversations with your customers.
Your messages can even be sent from your desktop to make things easier and more efficient. Your customers will already be reading your email on their phone so including your number in the email makes it easy for them to engage with your content and immediately reach out to you.
4) Include Links To Social Media Profiles
It is recommended to encourage engagement and build consumer-brand trust by including links within your emails to all active social media platforms.
Think about it, your users have already signed up to receive regular email content from you. This means it’s very likely that they want to follow your brand in other areas as well to consume any value-driven content you have to share with them.
Make it clear that the content shared on social media is different yet similar and beneficial and they will likely follow your various social media pages. This is an excellent way to extend your reach and gain new followers.
5) Keeping Up With The Competition
You don’t want to be just like everyone else, right? You want to set your company apart from it’s competition, right?! Well, that can be a little challenging to accomplish if you have no idea what your competition is up to.
Subscribing to the email lists of your competitors and checking out what type of content they share is a smart tactic used by the elite of marketers.
Take note of everything from social media updates , email subject lines, elements of their emails, and promotions and sales they offer. See what they’re doing successfully & see what they’re lacking. Use this information to your advantage – as a way to set yourself apart.
