Small Business Marketing Ideas: Building a Successful Email Strategy in Four Easy Steps.

Email marketing is a great way to get new visitors engaged with your business, as well as maintain relationships with your existing customers.

Get new website visitors to sign up for your newsletter by offering a bonus piece of content for subscribing (e.g. get your free ebook when you sign up for our newsletter). Slowly nurture your subscribers via email until they are ready to become paying customers. Start your email campaigns with a free email marketing service like MailChimp, Constant Contact or HubSpot.

Benefits of Small Business Email Marketing:

Reach new customers through your online content
Improve customer retention through consistent engagement
Drive sales with a customer loyalty program
Build a brand through thought leadership
Promote new products or services
Learn more about what your customers like and dislike
Stay top of mind for future customer needs

If you’re a small business owner — regardless of industry — email marketing can help you foster better customer relationships and build a stronger brand to help you keep growing.

Small business owners often assume that email marketing isn’t effective — and that email is just for the big guys. But they’re wrong. It’s time to get your small business started with email marketing.

Building a successful email strategy for your small business in four easy steps:

Building your email list
Planning out the types of emails you’ll send
Email design and content creation
Sending the campaign and reviewing the results

1. Start building your list

Before you start sending out emails, you need to have contacts to send those emails to.

In order to do that, you need to create a signup form and place it on your website, social media, and anywhere else you see fit. Be sure to include text that explains what users are signing up for when they give you their email.

2. Decide which emails you want to send

Now that you’ve started to grow your list of contacts, it’s time to decide which types of emails you want to send. The types of emails you send will depend on what type of small business you have. It’s always safe to start with a monthly email newsletter. Some other examples might include:

Promotional emails for special offers or sales
Seasonal messages (for holidays or special events)
Loyalty programs for your most dedicated customers
Transactional emails (eCommerce receipts, appointment notifications, etc.)

3. Create your email designs and content

After planning out the emails you want to send, you’ll need to actually create the content and email designs. Always keep your customer and the goal of your email campaign in mind. You want the content of your message to be clear along with the action you want subscribers to take.

Writing the email content

The best way to write targeted content is to first segment your email contacts into smaller lists with similar interests. If you send a mass email to all of your contacts, it’s nearly impossible to craft a message that is relevant for everyone. But if you’re able to find contacts with similar needs or interests and group them together, this challenge goes away.

There are a number of ways you can segment contacts depending on the data you have, including:

Demographics (age group, geography, gender)
Past purchase behavior (preferred product/services categories, number of purchases, whether or not past purchases were during promotions or sales)
Brand loyalty (new leads, longtime customers, VIPs)
Email engagement (customers who click on all of your emails vs. those who have never opened an email)

Once you break out your contacts into small groups, it becomes much easier to craft a message that resonates with your audience and drives more engagement.

Creating the design

Another important element of building your emails is the design. Email is supposed to save you time, so don’t waste it trying to create a masterpiece with your monthly newsletter. When thinking about your design, make sure you add a very clear call-to-action (CTA) button that corresponds to your offer in the email and tells readers what you want them to do. CTAs are usually a button that sends readers to your site to:

Read an article you’re promoting
Browse through new products on your site
Make a purchase using a discount code
Download an eBook that you wrote

Whatever you’re promoting, make sure you have a clear CTA.

4. Press send and review the performance to improve future campaigns

If you think you’re done once you hit send, think again. Email marketing provides a unique opportunity to learn from your customers. You should always be analyzing the performance of your emails regarding your email marketing KPIs. If you notice certain types of emails perform poorly with your audience, look for new ways to improve on the next campaign.

If you need help with your email marketing, contact us to learn how we can help.