A successful email marketing campaign is a cost-effective way to promote your business directly to a customer’s inbox.
Despite the buzz around social media and the sophistication of affiliate marketing, email marketing is one of the most effective ways small businesses can target customers and generate revenue.
It’s a cheap way to connect with existing and potential customers, so you should start building an email database as soon as you can.
Why use email marketing?
Low-cost
With no print costs, postage, or advertising fees to be paid, costs are generally lower than other marketing channels.
Easy to create
Sending a marketing email doesn’t require huge teams or lots of technical knowledge.
Fancy graphics and video can help but many successful email campaigns use plain text to deliver a clear message with a compelling offer.
Segmentation
You can send targeted marketing messages to different types of customers within your email database.
Segmenting your mailing list, such as by location, can boost customer engagement.
Emails about local deals and offers are a good example of this.
Easy to track
It’s easy to see what works and what doesn’t with email marketing.
Most email marketing platforms let you test subject lines, track open rates and clickthrough rates, so you can make future emails more effective by learning from what’s worked before.
Email hosts
Limits usually apply to the number of emails you can send from your normal business email address, so you’ll have to use a separate email service to send your marketing emails if sending to a long list of customers.
Email hosting services include tools for testing email campaigns and tracking activity.
Many are free for small businesses.
How to create an email marketing campaign
1. Mailing list
You need a list of email addresses of people who have agreed to receive marketing from you.
You can rent a mailing list, but this is expensive and response rates can be low.
It’s better to organically build a list from customers and visitors to your website.
Add an email newsletter sign up form to your website and use incentives such as discounts to encourage take up.
Remember that you should give people the option to unsubscribe from your mailing list within each email that you send.
Most email marketing platforms will include an unsubscribe button as standard in any email sent from it.
2. Segmentation
Use additional information such as age, gender, or location to tailor email campaigns to customer segments.
The more closely you align your email marketing to your target audience, the more successful it’s likely to be.
3. Subject line
Keep your subject line short and snappy and test different subject line topics to learn what makes your customers open your emails.
4. Personalisation
Address the email recipient on a personal level.
Using their name is much better than ‘Dear Customer.’
Where possible, make content personal, such as ‘As a thank you for your recent purchase…’, rather than blanket emails.
5. Content
Include a clear call to action and place it alongside your key message at the top of your email.
A well-designed email uses a mix of images and text but don’t overdo images as it can make the email slow to display.
6. Email schedule
Don’t send emails too often: once or twice a month is fine for small businesses.
Test when your customers are more likely to open emails.
Generally, Monday mornings, Friday afternoons, and weekends are considered bad times to send emails.
7. Evaluate
Analyse the performance of each email to refine your strategy.
Look at open and click rates to learn what worked well.
Discover more tips on how to get started with email marketing using our guide.
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Chapter nine: Digital advertising
Discover the benefits of digital advertising and learn how to create cost-effective pay-per-click campaigns with services like Google Ads.
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