Many small business owners make the mistake of writing email marketing off as an outdated and irrelevant form of marketing with little application to today’s markets. On the contrary, email marketing remains a powerful marketing tool for any business that is willing to invest in it properly. Below are 4 email marketing tips to help you implement email marketing the right way and reap the rewards for doing so.
Build Your Subscriber List
There is a reason that this tip tops most lists of email marketing tips. If you want your email marketing to be effective, you need to get your emails in front of as many people as possible. The only way of achieving this is with a strong email subscriber list. Populating your subscriber list should, therefore, be your priority.
The more opportunities you give users to sign up to your email list, the more likely they are to do so. You also need to strike the right balance between collecting valuable data about users who sign up to your subscriber list and not making the sign-up process so long and convoluted that no one wants to bother.
Use a Call to Action to Encourage Readers to Respond
Calls to action are an essential tool in any digital marketer’s toolkit. It is easy to underestimate the power of the CTA – they seem far too simple to be as effective as they are. However, there is ample evidence showing just how much of an impact calls to action can have on an audience’s behavior.
Encouraging your users to ‘click here’, ‘check out this link’, or even ‘visit our website for more’ will make it much more likely that they will do so. A CTA isn’t suddenly going to give you a 100% engagement rate, but it will make enough of a difference to be worth including.
Personalize Where You Can
Personalization is another simple but powerful tool that you should use with your email marketing. Advanced personalization that combines a number of individual data sources in order to provide a hitherto unthinkable level of personalization is now relatively easy to access, but is probably overkill for your email marketing.
Instead, stick to simple forms of personalization, such as addressing your audience by name. It might not seem like much, but it will instantly make your emails more appealing and, more importantly, more likely to be opened and read by your readers.
Take Steps to Avoid the Spam Folder
Don’t assume that you have no control over your users’ spam filters – there are things you can do to make it much more likely that your emails will make it past any filtering. Keep the number of exclamation marks in your subject lines to a minimum and avoid typing in all caps.
If your users are regularly reporting that your emails are being sent straight to the spam folder, consider readjusting your approach to composing your emails.
With the right approach, email marketing can still be a very powerful tool for marketing your small business. On its own, email marketing might not be enough, but it can augment your other marketing efforts.