19+ Best Email Marketing Tips For Small Businesses

Email marketing is one of the leading ways to find potential customers, attract more sales to your goods and services, and keep that group of lovingly devoted customers.

It is the most effective way of linking yourself to your potential buyers, bringing them close, and eventually turning them to your loyal customers.

So, if you are managing a small online store, business website, blog or even a physical store, email marketing is certainly one of the great channels for you to keep your old customers and still be able to effectively acquire new ones.

Current email marketing statistics tell us that,

1. About 3.8 billion people are email users worldwide, estimated to reach 4.4 billion users by 2023.
2. 44% of people who received a promotional email make at least one buy based on the broadcast.
3. By, 2019, 48% of businesses plan to increase their use of email marketing
4. 7 in 10 people affirmed that they used a coupon or sales discount from a promotional email in the earlier week. 

Tips for Email Marketing

Despite the time and effort consumed when growing a high-quality email list, it is important to note that a good quality list might be the game changer when it comes to conversions and returns on investment from your marketing operations.

The reason isn’t farfetched –  every successful email marketing operation is built on a solid email list.

Below are the 19+ email marketing tips and tricks that would help you to achieve your marketing goals.

1) Make it easy to opt-in

This is probably one of the most important steps you need to carefully consider when creating an email list.

You should make and keep the process of registration to your email list as easy and simple as possible.

The name and email address of every person is suitable for your cause, there isn’t any need for other unnecessary information such as date of birth or place of origin.

Having a long and bunched registration form can discourage your viewers from completing the registration form.

Aside from this, you could also try to summarize the whole registration process within a single click on the “Register” button.

If you wish, you could make the registration a lot easier for your viewers by allowing them to easily register through their social media accounts – be it Facebook or Instagram.

Not only would this be easy for them, but you will also be able to connect with them, chatting with them relentlessly through these platforms.

2) Use a lead magnet

Lead magnets are bonus content you gate behind an email opt-in form to encourage more signups for your business.

You have to make sure that you give reasons why your readers/visitors/customers should provide you their email addresses, clearly showing the profits in the registration process.

As you know it, not everyone is comfortable with sharing their email address with you.

You could try offering them free coupons, gift items, or discounts on their next purchase from your store to gain their trust.

3) The position of your registration box matters

This is a great factor that will determine the percentage of people that are willing to register to your email list.

The best ways of placing your registration box include placing it:

• At the top of the page, where visitors can easily view without scrolling down the page.
• At the top right sidebar, which is ideal for visitors to make registration when you have a sidebar placed at the top right corner.
• At the end of your articles –  By placing it at the bottom of your articles, viewers who are highly pleased with your write-ups will probably also register to your email list.
• At the footer –  This is a nice location for people who own online stores and websites that have no blog posts but still need people to register to their email list. It is one of the best places to place your registration box that would get you a high rate of email sign-ups.
• At the top of the homepage – This is a common method implemented by many common websites and pushers who want to get more email subscribers. Placing the sign-up option at the top of the homepage will spawn more sign-ups at a fast rate.

4) Make your messages personal

Try to make your messages as personal as possible by taking the time to customize each message that goes out of your mail.

You could always start with informing users undergoing the registration process about what is happening at each phase.

Then, interact with them in each mail by their first name to bring that personal touch and establish a strong relationship with them.

5) Take advantage of social media

There are numerous ways of expanding your email list other than through your website and using social media is one of them.

You can use either Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook to get more subscribers to your email list.

Show no form of hesitance when trying to ask your viewers to join your email list through these social media platforms.

Adding meaningful reasons why they should join your email list will make things a lot easier.

6) Send helpful tips and information

The main purpose of engaging in email marketing was to get new customers to your business and not more visitors to your site.

It is important to keep this at the back of your mind when running an email marketing campaign to increase your sales.

For instance, if you are selling various clothing and accessories and have an email list with which you run your email marketing operation, you need to make sure that the emails are fashion related and helpful.

Information about the latest fashion trends and clothing designs within the content and pointing out the fact that they can also visit your online store or website to make purchases is a great starting point.

7) Monitor the results and take counteractive measures if necessary

No matter the type of small business you own, big or small, popular or not, it is important to keep in mind that you should continually monitor the results of your email marketing periodically.

Keep eye on the errors that you have made along with the marketing campaign that cost you the loss of customers or subscribers.

Some of the results that should be closely monitored include:

• The email open rate
• The click rate
• The unsubscribe rate,
• The conversion rate and many more.

Then you should run and apply counteractive measures at the end of each phase if there is ever a need.

Email Marketing Tricks

8) Learn from your competitors

Would it not be fun and yet at the same time tactical to register on your competitor’s email list?

With you registered to your their email list, you will able to see:

• their marketing strategy,
• the type of emails they send out to their subscribers,
• the kind of products they normally promote,
• how frequent they communicate with their subscribers and many more.

Your main intention is not to copy your competitors’ marketing strategies but rather, to find better ones that would counteract that of your competitors, always putting yourself a step ahead.

9) Have a content marketing strategy in place

Content marketing is a type of marketing concentrated on making, publishing, and allotting content for a target audience.

With the definition of content marketing made clear, it is important not to confuse content marketing, email marketing and social media marketing with one another.

To excel at your email marketing campaign, you need to have an effective content marketing strategy.

This strategy must be appealing and able to convince recipients to purchase your goods and services.

10) Add social media buttons to the mails

You can effectively grow your social media profiles by placing a link to your profile pages within the body of the newsletter.

One effective way to go about this is to add social media buttons that would help connect email recipients to your social networks and by so doing help build a following.

11) Make use of an email marketing service

Not sending out your mails through email vendors is a mistake you should try to avoid. It is also not recommended to make use of either Outlook or Gmail to send bulk messages to your email list.

Due to the risks involved, it is recommended that you hire or make use of the services of a professional email marketing company that would guide you from making mistakes.

12) Make text and images easy to read and view

You should not expect your subscribers to spend a lot of time reading your emails or reading them regularly.

The best means to combat this is to try to grab their attention within the first few lines of the mail. Consequently, it is important to work on your titles and format. Make the headline catchy at all times.

13) Use your list to boost sales

You could also learn the various marketing strategies from top successful online stores such as Amazon.com and discover how and why they are so successful.

For instance, when you view one or more products, you will be given some suggestions similar to those products through emails.

Also, when you buy a product from Amazon, you will be sent an email that has ideas of similars products that will be beneficial to you.

Even if you do not have the time or resources to carry out this type of inquiry; you should still be able to know your subscribers and customers when you learn to study your email list.

14) Be clear about what your subscribers should expect

You should inform your subscribers beforehand what type of information they can constantly expect from you, whether informational articles, infographics, coupons, sales pitches and offers.

In the process of encouraging subscribers to opt-in your list, try not to make promises or set expectations you can’t fulfill.

common email marketing mistakes

Learning from other people’s mistakes can help prevent you from making those same errors and spur you to get better results at the same time.

Here are a few email marketing mistakes that small businesses make.

15) Not having an email list

Creating an email list is one of the first things to do when starting an email marketing campaign. Not having one in the first place is one of the silliest mistakes you can make after starting a business.

There is no forgivable excuse for not creating and sustaining the email list for your online business, store, small business or website.

16) Not using your email list

One of the few mistakes you shouldn’t make is having an email list but not making optimum use of the list.

You should never have an excuse for not sending out newsletters even when you are reluctant, scared or just don’t have the time.

There are a lot of benefits to sending out the newsletters as it promotes communication between you and your subscribers.

Alternatively, if you are not available to send out newsletters, why not hire a pro to take on the responsibility. One way or the other, you will have your newsletters sent out.

17) Purchasing email addresses from other sources

Do not result to this alternative as there are many companies out there offering to sell the email addresses of unknown persons to help grow your list fast.

You are very wrong if you think you can achieve a better success rate by buying email addresses. Ultimately, you will end up sending unsolicited messages which will increase the rate of unsubscription.

Instead, you should try to grow your email list the natural way – through your hard work, determination, and special techniques.

18) Not sticking with email marketing best practices

In order not to be considered a spammer when sending out bulk emails or newsletters, you must follow through the best practices and standards.

Some of these practices dictate that you need to have the unsubscribe option included in the emails or newsletters you send out

You also need to remind your subscribers how you got their email addresses in other to avoid being reported as spam.

Finally, remind yourself of the importance of only sending emails that have HTML links and text content.

19) Not encouraging your subscribers to add you to their contacts’ list

It isn’t bad if you ask your subscribers to add you to their contact list. This will help make sure that your newsletters or emails are not considered spam.

This way, your messages will always find their way into the inbox and not the junk folder.

20) Overlooking A/B testing

Aside from observing the performance of your email marketing campaign, you should try to carry out various tests to study your performance and see which method as worked best for your business.

A few test samples you can carry out are:

• The exact time the emails were sent – You could compare the time the emails were sent and then discover which one had more reads at that time.
• Position of the signup box – Choosing the right place to place the signup box will affect the number of subscribers you will get.
• Titles of your emails – Which title will have a larger open rate, a long one or a short one. It all comes down to choosing the right one.
• The type of email you send – Before constructing and sending an email to your subscribers, you must research and choose the right email that would suit your subscribers and achieve its purpose best.
• Use of images – Including images in your emails or newsletters attracts a high click rate. Test and decide on that.

21) Not optimizing for mobile devices

• 46% of emails are read over mobile devices and this is expected to rise to more than 60% by the end of 2019!
• Unfortunately, 39% of marketers have no strategy for mobile emails.

With the statistics above, you can see the importance of having a mobile-friendly email marketing strategy.

So, before finalizing your campaign, make sure that it is tested against all major mobile devices.

22) Not asking for email verification

Getting email verification from your subscribers will help to know the inactive accounts in your email list.

This is an important step for you if you’re to achieve an effective email marketing campaign.

In summary, look at the quality rather than the quantity of your email list.

23) Not offering incentives for signups

Not taking the time to think about incentives and other ways to increase your email list is a major reason for not getting a good return on your investment.

So, you need to give some incentives for certain categories of people to signup to your list. This can be in the form of a discount or special deals to subscribers.

24) Making it difficult to unsubscribe

If for once you think that you can keep people from leaving your email list by hiding the unsubscribe button, you are wrong.

It is better to be unsubscribed than to have your email address addressed as spam.

25) Overdoing it

Sending many emails within a short period in the hope that you will get more interests is offensive and unprofessional.

Better still, provide options to change subscription status by allowing people to choose to either get more emails from you if they wish or only on special occasions.

You might also like: