Email Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
Thinking about starting a newsletter or interested in reaching out to your customers or contacts via email? Email marketing is a FANTASTIC way to reach people online without spending a fortune (or without spending any money, really!). Before you get started, check out these top 5 email marketing tips…
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- Using a personal account vs. email provider specialist.If you’re just starting out and aren’t managing too many email addresses, you can always email your contacts via your personal or company email account (gmail, yahoo, outlook, etc.). Just make sure to paste your list of emails into the BCC field to keep your recipients confidential. Many small businesses may find this limiting though as the customization options aren’t great and there aren’t any good tracking metrics. As your email list grows you’ll probably want better options and an email provider specialist like MailChimp, iContact or Constant Contact can help with this. You’ll be able to track who opens your emails, who clicks through to your website, and much more. You’ll also be able to customize the look and feel of your emails. Mailchimp is a great platform to start with as you can use it for FREE for up to 2,000 email contact
- Keep your branding consistent. Your branding should be consistent across all marketing channels (website, social media, email, etc.). If you’re starting out with a simple template, include a top banner that utilizes your company logo and colors, phone number, website url, and address (if pertinent). You want your contacts to recognize your brand when they open the email and not leave them guessing as to who is contacting them.
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- Content is king. This might seem obvious, but you want to email your contacts with engaging content that they want to receive. Not sure what to send your contacts? If you’re creating a newsletter with multiple sections, perhaps you include a couple articles and a company sale or promotion. Listen to the questions that your customers are asking and then write about those topics. Provide tips and tricks relevant to your industry and customer interests. Make sure your content is scannable, you don’t need to include an entire article in one email or newsletter, instead include a “read more” link that directs to your website for the full article.
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- Segment your list. As previously mentioned, when you first start out you probably won’t have too many subscribers (unless you’ve been collecting customer or contact emails for a while). As your email list does grow, you may want to segment it into different groups. Maybe you want to segment your customers by location and email only local customers about an in-store deal that other customers who live in another state or country wouldn’t be interested in. Perhaps you want to have one list of customers who bought and another list of leads or people who inquired but never purchased. Your messaging will likely be different for different groups and an email provider such as Mailchimp will make it easy to create and manage multiple lists. The last thing you want to do is email irrelevant content to your contacts.
- Make it easy to subscribe. Add a sign-up form to your website or blog (the easier to find the better!). Your form can include just name and email address or ask for additional items like birthday for example (for companies who want to send a special gift on their customer’s special day). Don’t make your form too cumbersome though as users might shy away. Once your form is complete, post the link to it on social media and ask your fans to sign up.
I hope you found these email marketing tips helpful. This is another vast area of marketing and I could include many more tips, but this should provide a good foundation. If you have any questions regarding email marketing, please email me, Amy Grishman at amy@socialfocus.com from www.socialfocus.com.