Best Email Marketing Practices for Small Businesses [Complete Guide]

As a business owner, you should be focusing on building relationships with your existing and prospective customers. The importance of email marketing for small businesses is second to none.

Needless to say, it plays a crucial role for your customers who attempt to make an informed buying decision.

What lies at the heart of email marketing is the list of your target audience.

Once you know the best practices of email marketing, it will be much easier for you to bring in revenue for your business.

Basics of Making Email Marketing Work for Your Business

Email marketing works. Want proof? You will be enjoying a return on $32 for every $1 spent on email marketing. With email marketing, you can create awareness, promote your product, convert your lead, and much more
Setting up your email marketing funnel is not an easy task. And, that’s why we have created this guide for you to excel at email marketing.
Email marketing is one of the most widely used digital marketing strategies that help you to connect with both your prospects and customers in seamless fashion. When done right, email marketing has the ability to convert inquiries into leads and leads into repeat customers.

What is Email Marketing Software for Small Business?

Email marketing software is a dime a dozen today. This kind of software is built to help you with sending emails on time and track them for success rate.

Not only will you be able to understand the way customers interact with your email but also to measure conversion.

You will gain insights into metrics such as open rates, bounce rates, CTR, and so on.

If you are wondering if email marketing really helps your business, you must know that it is one of the most inexpensive and easy-to-use tools that you must leverage today.

Here is why you should invest in email marketing in order to drive growth in your business:

1) According to Optionmaster, email marketing is the #1 communication channel that you can use to reach out to your customers on a regular basis. Needless to say, this is not true for other communication channels.
2) None knows your leads and prospects better than you. While your social media accounts might be suspended or deleted at any point in time due to changes in regulation, email marketing never takes your leads away from you.
3) Effective email marketing for small business owners helps them to convert leads more than any other channel. If you are concerned about AOV i.e. Average Order Value, email marketing gives you three times higher AOV than social media channels.

What Are Email Marketing Benefits?

You will get both qualified and unqualified leads at the same time. Now it’s up to you how you want to nurture them as they travel through the funnel. Here are some of the use cases that we follow at Corefactors to talk about our product Teleduce.

1) Fostering Relationships: The best email marketing service for business empowers you to foster relationships with your customers, leads, and prospects. Sending the right message at the right time is the key to success.
2) Creating TOMA (Top-of-mind Awareness): Staying at the top-of-mind of your customers is the most wonderful thing that you can ever achieve. With informative and educative content, you create brand awareness until your leads are sales-ready.
3) Promoting Content: Sharing relevant content with your customers keeps them glued to your business. That’s why you should be using email marketing to promote your content.
4) Generating Leads: With email marketing tools and strategies in place, you will be able to generate leads in no time. The key here is to share information that is of the highest value to your prospects.
5) Marketing the Product: Email marketing empowers you with the opportunity to convey the USP of your product as well.
6) Nurturing Prospects: Your customers might be online when you aren’t. With email marketing, you nurture prospects throughout the funnel. You engage with them based on their interactions and behaviors. You will get all these details from the lead management system of yours.

6 Steps to Follow for Creating Email Marketing Strategy

Strategies for email marketing for business to business might differ from each other. However, these 6 steps will help you to get a hang of how to build an email marketing strategy for your business.
Once you have a comprehensive understanding of these elements, you will be able to do email marketing better.

a) Understanding Your Audience: To be able to do email marketing better, you need to understand whom you are talking to. Getting familiar to buyer persona is the first step of creating an effective email strategy. Once you understand the needs of your customers, you will be able to cater to such needs.
b) Set a Goal: No matter what you are doing, it’s very important that you have a goal in front of you. Before setting a goal, you must research the email statistics relevant to your industry. Based on those, you can create a goal for yourself.
c) Bring’em In: You can’t run an email marketing campaign unless you have email address of your users. In order to have users, you need a number of ways using which your prospects can come, opt-in, and subscribe to your emails. It takes a significant time to build your email marketing list organically.
d) Type of Email Campaign: What kind of email campaign will you be running? Depending on your needs, you can send a weekly newsletter or updates or new announcements to your customers. There is no fixed email type that you should be sent to your customers. It depends on your customers and how you want to engage with them. That’s why you should track customers’ behavior and activities from the best lead management system that you are using.
e) Creating a Schedule: Depending on your audience, you can create a schedule. While making a schedule, it is desired that you maintain consistency to build trust and credibility.
f) Tracking Metrics: As you run email marketing campaigns, you will certainly want to measure metrics. With attention to detail, you will be able to track the outcome of the efforts put together by you and your team.

How Can You Build Your Email List?

Once you are done learning how to use email marketing for business, it’s time to delve deep into how you can build your email list.

Your email list should contain leads who are eager to hear from you and learn more about your products.

Building an email list has two components i.e. Lead Magnet and Opt-in form. In this blog, you will learn about both in detail.

What is Lead Magnet?

Would you subscribe to an email marketing newsletter if there is no value for you? Probably not. The same happens with your prospects as well.

Lead Magnet refers to the way in which you attract your prospects. No matter how you are planning to bring them in, you must offer something that is of value to them. Once you provide them with something valuable, you can ask for their email address.

You can create different types of content that work as lead magnets i.e. ebook, whitepaper, template, webinar, report, checklist, tool, and so on.

5 Best Practices for Creating Lead Magnet

Relevance is the key to creating an efficient lead magnet. Once your prospects understand the value you are offering, you will fetch the leads faster.
In this ultimate guide to email marketing for business, you will get to know some of the best practices to be followed while creating a lead magnet:

1) Address the Problem: An ideal lead magnet addresses a problem and comes with actionable insights.
2) Digital Delivery: You would definitely want to deliver such assets in digital format. Keeping it digital makes it easier for your leads to consume it.
3) Align the Content With the Offer: While creating a lead magnet, you must make sure that the content aligns well with the offer.
4) Drive Them Towards the Paid Version: A lead magnet needs to show the value that your product or service can add to their life. Once they understand the value of your product, you will be able to push them towards the paid solution.
5) Offers Relevant to Their Journey: All your buyers are at different stages of the funnel. You must provide them with offers that are relevant to their journey.

5 Things to Keep in Mind While Creating Opt-in Form

While creating an opt-in form, you must keep a few things in mind as these will help you make the most out of the email marketing tools for small businesses. Here you go:

1) Grab Their Attention: Most of the people today have a less attention span. That’s why you need to stand out from the crowd, excite people, and attract them. Start with an engaging header and an attractive email design
2) Relevant Copy: While there is no problem with writing clickbait headlines, your offer and copy should match. Your leads shouldn’t feel like they have been deceived.
3) Confirm the Opt-in: While it may seem silly to tell your customers to opt in twice, customers actually prefer to receive confirmation on their opt-in.
4) Make the Form Simple: Already decided the fields to put in the form? You don’t want your leads to get scared. So, it is best to ask for the essential information that you need to engage with them.
5) Checking the Flow: Once you are done creating the flow, you should always check it again. This will help you to ensure that everything on your page is working.

Email Segmentation: Everything You Need to Know

Email segmentation is one of the most important foundations that email marketers focus on. It refers to the segmentation of your target audience based on a number of factors including their interests and activities. Do you know segmented emails have the capability to generate 58% of total revenue?

Why Should You Do Email Segmentation?

Not all of your leads are ready to make a purchase. Some of them are sales-qualified.

Many of them are marketing qualified. Even marketing qualified leads are at different stages of the funnel.

For example, if a lead of yours is not aware of how your product can solve his or her problem, it doesn’t make sense for you to send that coupon to those leads.

Because he or she hasn’t been nurtured yet. Every email that you send should talk on behalf of you. Once you segment leads, you will be able to connect with them in a better fashion.

How to Segment Your Leads for Email Marketing?

Segmenting leads is simple once you understand the buyer’s journey. The first step is to create different opt-in forms so that your leads are separated for future communication.

You can segment the leads in terms of location, lifecycle stage, industry, language, job title, previous interactions, and so on.

You can segment leads for email marketing based on a number of factors like:
1) Demographics: You can start segmenting leads based on demographic information such as age, gender, income, and company. All these will tell you a lot about the needs and interests of these persons.
2) Geography: Geography plays a crucial role in determining purchase behavior. You can leverage geographic data for the purpose of regional promotion, time-based notifications, and so on.
3) Previous Purchases: Previous purchases play a great role in deciding whom to engage with and how. This optimized targeting helps you in recommending products or services based on their previous purchases.
4) Position in the Funnel: You can easily segment leads based on your position in the funnel. For example, if someone just opted in, you would definitely want to make them more aware of your products and service rather than directly selling.
5) Website Behavior: Another great way of segmenting leads is to track the behavior of your leads on the website. As they spend more time on a page, you get to know that they are keen to know more about that product or service. And, you can send a relevant email.

How Not to Send Emails To Spam Folder?

By now you probably have a fair idea of why use email marketing for business.

But there is no benefit if your emails land in the spam folder. Just like you don’t check your spam email, your customers don’t either.

1) Whitelisting: Whitelisting helps you to not land in the spam folder. What does it mean to get whitelisted? To get whitelisted, your subscribers have to add you to their address book.
2) Spam Trigger Words: Your copy matters a lot. While writing emails, you should ideally refrain from using all capital letters. In addition, you need to be careful about spam trigger words which often end up being marked down by the ISPs. Such words include ‘order now’, ‘click below’, and so on.
3) Reliable Email Service Provider: Using a reliable email service provider is one of the most crucial things. The deliverability of your emails depends on your service provider to a great extent. Use a DMARC checker to make sure your emails are securely encrypted with DMARC as it affects email deliverability greatly.
4) Doubt Opt-In: When you ask your subscribers to opt-in two times, you reduce your chances of ending up in spam as well. Besides, you ensure that your subscriber is genuinely interested in receiving updates from you.

What Are the Metrics to Track For Email Marketing For Small Business?

No matter what email marketing platform you are using, you should keep an eye on these metrics for better performance. These are the key metrics that you must measure while running email marketing campaigns:
Deliverability: Deliverability refers to the rate at which your emails are reaching the intended destination of your customers’ inbox.
Open Rate: Open rate is nothing but the rate at which people open the emails you send.
Click Through Rate: Click Through Rate or CTR is the rate at which people click on your call-to-action buttons.
Unsubscription Rate: This is one of the crucial metrics that you should be tracking. It helps you to understand whether your subscribers are opting out.

How to Improve Results Using Email Marketing Platforms for Small Business?

Your email marketing results depend on a number of factors. As you measure the KPIs, you will understand it takes a detailed understanding to figure out what is working and what is not. Here are some of the variables that you might consider playing with:

Better Deliverability: To ensure better deliverability, you must remove inactive people from your email list. This will leave the engaged subscribers only. Implementing this practice helps you in ensuring that you have an audience that is ready to engage with your content.
Increased Open Rate: Open rate can be increased in a number of ways. You can try doing experiments with the subject line and time of delivery as well. In addition, you can keep an eye on the day as well.
Improved CTR: To improve CTR, you must do experiments with a copy of your email. Providing your readers with clear direction and actionable steps is very important.
Reducing Unsubscription Rate: There is nothing wrong when uninterested people take themselves off your mailing list. However, you must be sure that your emails are aligned with your brand. Also, these emails must provide value to your audience.

Conclusion:

Now that you know the steps required for creating an email marketing strategy, building an email list, and so on, you will find it much easier to create your email marketing strategy and convert leads.

Try Teleduce from Corefactors to enjoy a high rate of deliverability, rich templates for different industries, all metrics in one place, and so on.
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