Compared to multinational corporations, small businesses operate on a much smaller budget. This is why you need to carefully consider how you spend your marketing resources.

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective channels you can use. That being said, knowing the right strategies will ensure that you unleash the full potential of email for your business.  

In this post, you’ll learn five strategies that will enable you to maximise the power of email marketing.

 

1. Determine the most suitable email marketing service for your business.

The first step to email marketing success is choosing the best possible email marketing service for your business. Establish your goals and choose the email marketing service that can help you achieve these goals.

Features you should look for in an email marketing service include:

• Email templates - As an entrepreneur, you spend your day tackling plenty of tasks. Use an email marketing service that offers a wide range of responsive email templates so that you can design professional, mobile-optimised emails in a snap.
• Analytics - Your email marketing service should have robust analytics capabilities. This way, you can accurately measure your email marketing performance.
• Integrations - Use an email marketing service that can integrate with your CRM as well as other third-party software you currently use. This streamlines your processes and allows you to import the data of your existing customers for segmentation and personalisation purposes.

Remember, there is no such thing as the perfect email marketing service. What matters is that you choose the one that suits your budget, your objectives, and the size of your audience.

 

2. Make subscribing easy for your visitors.

To build a sizeable subscriber list, it’s important that you give website visitors plenty of chances to sign up. 

Here are examples of subscription forms you can strategically place throughout your website.

• Button - Place signup CTA buttons at the bottom of blog posts to encourage your readers to subscribe.
• Landing page - Certain email marketing services have tools you can use to create landing pages to gather information from your website visitors.

 

Source: ICRC

• Checkout page - If you run an e-commerce business, your website’s checkout page is an ideal place to gather new subscribers. 
• Social media - On Twitter, you can tweet links to your landing pages or subscription forms.  

 

3. Keep your list healthy.

Like your budget, your list of subscribers is also smaller compared to well-known brands. This is why maintaining the health of your list is paramount. An enormous subscriber base won’t matter if most of them are disengaged.

The old adage that “prevention is better than cure” is certainly true when it comes to email list health. It’s always better to practice list hygiene from the start than do damage control later on.

You can maintain a healthy list from the outset by using the double opt-in method of confirmation. This involves sending an email to new subscribers and asking them to click on a link within your email in order to confirm their subscription.

With double opt-in, your subscribers give you explicit permission to send them emails. This ensures that you are in compliance with  GDPR. Furthermore, it allows you to weed out invalid email addresses since users who don’t confirm their subscription are not added to your list.

 

4. Segment your list.

The time of email blitzing is long gone. Today, email marketing is all about sending timely and relevant messages to the right audiences. To do this, you need to segment your subscribers. 

Here are various data points you can use for your segmentation efforts.

• Age - This is a classic method of segmentation that allows you to target different age groups and send messages to people with the same characteristics.
• Gender - Creating this type of segment is useful especially if you offer.

Source: Campaign Monitor

• Location - Categorising subscribers according to their location is ideal for events and other location-specific promotions. For example, if you are participating in a convention or conference that will be held at a certain venue, you can send event invitations to subscribers who are located near and around that venue. 
• Behavior - You can create separate segments based on how subscribers interact with your emails, what products they purchase, or how frequently they make purchases.

 

5. Take advantage of automation.

Plenty of entrepreneurs perform every aspect for their businesses. In fact, a recent survey indicated that 15.3% of entrepreneurs execute all the marketing duties for their businesses.

If you’re like these entrepreneurs, you don’t have the time to sit down at your computer and send emails all day. Fortunately, with email marketing automation, you don’t have to.

When deciding on an email marketing service, it’s crucial that you choose one with automation features. These features give you the ability to automate certain messages such as:

• Welcome series - Automate your welcome emails so that new subscribers receive a personalised welcome message immediately after they sign up.
• Holiday promotions - The good thing about automating these types of emails is that you can set all of them up at the beginning of the year. All you have to do is wait for conversions to start pouring in.
• Product recommendations - Send product recommendations that are personalised based on the recent purchases of the subscriber receiving the email.

 

6. Wrap up

There you have it — five email marketing strategies that you should know about. While this post is by no means an exhaustive list, the strategies outlined here will definitely help you expand your audience, boost engagement, and increase your email marketing ROI.

 

Author Bio: Ash Salleh is the Director of SEO at Campaign Monitor, where he works closely with content, copy, and analytics teams to improve site-wide optimisation. Prior to his time at Campaign Monitor, he also provided SEO and digital marketing expertise at Zappos and Axiata Digital.

 

To find out how ib3 can help you manage your email marketing strategies and campaigns, please call Steve on 01732 449975 or email steve@ib3.uk.