Email Marketing For Small Businesses: Ultimate Guide — Bizzpreneur

Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing strategies in the world of business. It is a great way to reach your customers where they are without spending lots of money. In fact, email marketing was voted by customers to be the most preferred way to receive promotional messages. So if you haven’t added email marketing to your marketing arsenal, you will want to read on to discover the complete step-by-step guide to email marketing for small businesses.

What Is Email Marketing For Small Businesses?

Email Marketing for small businesses is simply a marketing strategy for sending out promotional messages to prospects and customers through email. In other words, it is the process of sending a commercial message to a group of targeted potential or current customers, using email.

To shed more light to what email marketing is, it is simply a three step process, which include;

• Collecting your users/readers/consumers email address.
• Adding them to your email list, and
• Sending out emails to them using that list at a later convenient time.

Email address collection which is mostly referred to as Email List Building, it is the most vital and hardest part of email marketing. But don’t worry, it will be simplified later in the article, where I will show you the fastest and smartest ways to build your email list.

Benefits Of Email Marketing For Small Businesses.

Now that you’ve known what email marketing is, you also need to know the importance of email marketing to your business.

Well, below are some ways your small business can benefit from email marketing.

• Low Costs: Is email marketing affordable by small business owners? Absolutely. In fact, one of the main merits of email marketing is its lower costs compared to other forms of marketing.
• Offers Great Return On Investment (ROI): You may probably be thinking is email marketing profitable, or is it worth my time? Well, according to DMA, for every $1 spent on email marketing, the return on investment is $35. In fact, the ROI of email marketing is unravelled.
• Quick Results: Unlike SEO or Content Marketing, a business can start seeing results almost immediately after emails are being sent. For instance, after 24 hours of publishing new posts, over 30% of my traffic comes from my email list.
• Targeting High Converting Audience: Most of your email list subscribers have probably visited your site/landing page before right? If so, they definitely find value in your contents/products, that is why they subscribed. This means there is a high chance of getting them to take actions when they see your email.
• Easy To Get Started: One of the best benefits of email marketing is that it is easy to learn and get started. This means you don’t need any expanded understandings like you need with social media marketing, Content marketing and more. All you need is just a good understanding of your audience and how to write high converting emails.
• Easy For Tracking: Another benefit of email advertising for small business is it makes you easily identify where you’re going wrong with your marketing strategy. Most email marketing software like Getresponse provides room for campaign improvement by letting you track your subscribers behavior such as open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate.
• Increase Sales/Revenue: With a catchy call to action and direct link to checkout, email advertising can get you more sales than any other advertising channels. In fact, marketing week reports that email generates up to $29 billion retail sales yearly.
• Global Reach: Unlike other advertising channels, email marketing helps you reach global audiences at no extra cost.
• You Own Your List: And the most important email marketing benefits of all is, no one can take your email subscribers from you, as you’re the sole owner of your list.

How To Do Email Marketing For Small Businesses?

Email marketing is an easy to learn and implement marketing technique. This means you do not need to buy expensive courses like you may, to learn facebook or YouTube ads. All you need is to know how to write high quality and engaging emails.

Before starting an email advertising, you need to pick the best email service provider, best strategies to apply, and best tools that will take your email marketing campaign to the next level.

Best Email Marketing Services For Small Businesses.

Getresponse is one of the most popular, easy to use and simplifies email marketing services for small businesses.

Their service offers drag and drop builder, and also beautiful opt-in forms, landing pages, and A/B testing. They also offer a great unsubscribe tracking tool and autoresponder.

With their free trials, you can integrate with third party lead generation software like Google Docs, ZenDesk, and OptinMonster.

They offer good customer service and their pricing starts at $15/month.

Active campaign is another email service provider which offers similar services to Getresponse.

They offer pre-built automation recipes, free implementation and migration, and easy subscription management for your list. They also give you access to a free online training and support, community access, and even provide free accessibility to hand-on training.

Some of their features are:

One of the best email services for bloggers, authors, and marketers is ConvertKit. It is a robust email marketing platform that is extremely easy to use and also incredibly powerful.

ConvertKit offers amazing features that allows you to easily and effectively offer content upgrades and incentives with their signup form. Not only that, it’s features also help filter out fake emails. It also comes with a beautiful easy to use autoresponder.

Their service also allows you to segment your subscribers based on interest and also those who have already purchased.

AWeber is one of the most trusted and oldest email marketing services. Not only for small businesses, as they offer top-notch services that medium and even established businesses can use to grow their business.

Their features include

• List management
• Autoresponder
• Email tracking
• Amp emails
• Automatic RSS-to-Email for bloggers
• Subscribers segmentation
• A/B testing
• Multiple customers support options

Above are some of the best email marketing services and also tools from each service.

Email Marketing Best Practices

After setting up your account with any of the email marketing service provider list above, it’s time to start collecting your visitor’s email address. There are many ways to collect their emails.

How To Build Email List

The fastest and easiest way to collect emails is through blog posts. This can be done by embedding your email opt-in form on your blog. This means you will ask your visitors to enter their first name and email address.

You can also collect emails through your sales page. This can be done by asking for your customer’s email address at the checkout.

You can put out your form on social media too so as to easily build your email list. This can be done by sharing your opt-in forms, targeting your potential audience.

Techniques For Collecting Emails.

Now that you’ve known some of the places where you can collect your customers’ email address from, you also need to know the techniques you can use to collect them.

This is the most popular technique of collecting email addresses. This simply means offering free gifts like vouchers, Ebooks, video courses and even giveaways in exchange for your customers email address.

I’m sure you’ve seen a pop-up asking you to put in your email address so as to get an e-book on many websites. So that is actually what I meant here.

Before doing this, make sure you have an offer that is worthy of your customers email address. Doing this will make them not to unsubscribe after getting the offers.

You can create unique surveys on SurveyMonkey so as to get your customers’ email address. This can be done by creating a survey that is relevant to your business, then asking your customers to answer the survey and at the end, politely ask for their email address.

How To Manage Your Email List.

Collecting hundreds of email addresses doesn’t mean all your subscribers would take actions after receiving your emails. Since generating leads and getting more sales is the goal of marketing, you need to know how to nurture your email list, so as to make this happen.

Below are some strategies you can start implementing.

Building a legitimate email list can be a strenuous task for small businesses. So to make it easy, you need to make sure you add a signup link on every page of your website. This will make it easy for new visitors to find your opt-in form. Also keep your signup form portable. For instance, some new visitors may be bored seeing a huge for, and this might make the click off.

While sending out your emails, make it engaging. This means you should let your customers know that your mail was intended for them. This will increase your open rate, click-through rate and reduce your unsubscribe rate also.

More than 70% of your subscribers will definitely open your email on a smartphone. So you need to make sure your email is mobile friendly. Some of the email marketing services allow you to preview your email before sending it. This will make you have the full insight how it will look on mobile devices, PC, and tablets.

Adding call-to-action may seem easy, but adding them at the wrong time may cost a lot. Call-to-action isn’t just for linking to a product you want to send your customers to. Sometimes, you just need to send emails to keep your subscribers engaged, so you need to provide real value in your call to action. This means adding a call to action like “Check Out Our New Blog” Or “Visit Our Website For More Info”. Adding this will also help increase your website traffic.

You don’t want to be sending emails about fitness to digital marketers, they is not will not even open the email talk less to visiting your products. So you need to segment your audience based on interest and maybe conversion.

Conclusion:

Well, That’s it.

Your email list is the most powerful marketing tool you’ll ever have. So you need to treat it specially.

In this article, we go in-depth about email marketing for small businesses, where we discussed what email marketing is, benefits of email marketing for small businesses, email marketing software and tools, how to do email marketing for small businesses, and email marketing best practices.

Following and implementing all the steps listed in this article could make you double your traffic, generate more leads, and most importantly drive more sales.

Originally published at https://bizzpreneur.com on April 4, 2021.