- Jamie
5 Best Practices for Your Small Business Email Marketing
Email marketing is a powerful tool in your small business marketing efforts. It's one of the most effective marketing tools to connect with your ideal customers. Email marketing is so effective because it connects with an already engaged audience. Unless the email is forwarded from a friend, your email contact is requested to be on the list. That means they're already interested in your product or service, putting them further down the marketing funnel than others. One way to keep them engaged is to observe these best practices in mind with your email marketing.
Determine Your Goals and Plan Your Strategy
As with every other marketing endeavor, success starts with a plan. Decide on your overarching business goals for your campaign and plan your strategy around them.
Develop an email marketing calendar to plot out your email marketing plan. Include critical information like campaign owners, assets, deadlines, target audience, and goals.
Build and Take Care of Your List
When developing your list, do not purchase a list. Build it by advertising it at your location and using signup forms with valuable incentives to potential contacts to encourage signing up.
Make sure your sign-up is double opt-in. This means the contact must confirm they want to be on the newsletter list before they are added as subscribers.
Consider your cadence. When thinking about why I unsubscribe, too many emails is often the reason.
Clean up your lists regularly - including identifying hard bounce contacts and remove from your subscriber list.
Make sure your unsubscribe process is seamless and straightforward.
Create a Genuinely Engaging User Experience From the Moment Your Email Lands in Their Inbox
Use consistent branding when creating your email. Ensure your brand assets provide a cohesive experience from website to email to social media, including colors, fonts, and logo.
Work HARD on your subject line, and make sure it communicates the contents of the email. Think about what makes you as a customer open emails you receive from other businesses, and use that to craft several versions. If you're stuck on your subject line, work on the body of the email and come back to it - this often helps me get past any blocks.
After landing on your best subject line, work on engaging, effective copy. Start with your email's objective, focus on your product's or service's benefits, and keep it short and sweet - including a stand-out call-to-action.
Consider your overall design
Test your design's appearance on computer, tablet, and mobile screens.
Ensure your newsletter's design and content are built with accessibility in mind. Learn more about that here.
Test and measure for insights on campaign performance
Before you begin, decide what metrics will determine your success and research benchmarks you want to reach.
Test your emails with A/B testing. This means you send one version to one segment and one to another for insight into which version achieves the best result.
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