Just because you are a small business doesn’t mean you lack the resources to integrate email campaign tactics that are deployed by large organizations into your marketing strategy. Email service providers are now making it easier for companies to automate their emails and implement nurturing campaigns, despite having a one person marketing team. All it takes is a little time and patience to outline a strategy, set your campaigns and analyze your results.
It is understandable that small businesses are overwhelmed with the amount of features that are now available to email marketers. It is easy to feel like you don’t have the time to log into your system and build out a lifecycle campaign that will engage your audience for the next 6 months to a year. Heck, you can hardly find time to pay your vendors and follow up with your customers. But think of the extra staff you can hire after your email campaigns get a 600% lift in performance.
It is time to stop making excuses and dedicate time to your email marketing campaigns. Implement these steps into your email marketing and it will start to reach its potential ROI.
Personalize Your Messages.
The cat is out of the bag, everyone now knows that when you signup to receive something using an online form chances are the follow-up email, regardless of how personal it may appear, is generated through an automated process and not sent by the actual CEO of the company whose name is provided in the signature of the email.
So it will be no surprise to your customer when you don’t personally respond to their online purchase or send a welcome email for joining your company. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make your client feel like your email is written for them specifically. Send a welcome message and merge their name into the content. Most email marketing tools allow you to do this with a very simple merge field, something like %%first.name%% or {first name}, you can usually find this in a quick start guide.
If you offer different products and services make sure your message is tailored towards exactly what the subscriber is interested in. This is easy to do using drop down fields in the form or custom forms for each product on your website. You can trigger an email to send when a customer is added to your list, further more you can set a rule that tells your email software to use either dynamic content or choose a specific email template to send based on a certain criteria.
There are endless ways to personalize your data including collecting your clients preferences in their subscription form. The idea is to start with what you have time to setup and incorporate changes as you can.
Test Your Content.
This one may be one of the easiest to do, yet often over looked when you are just rushing to get a promotion into people’s inboxes. If this email doesn’t work you can always change it next time, right? Wrong. Every email will influence your subscribers’ behavior in the future. If you send an email that just fails to miss the mark with them the chances they will unsubscribe is highly likely or maybe they will just ignore the next message that ends up in their inbox from you.
If you take the time to set up 3 – 4 emails with different calls to actions and subject lines, you can send these varying campaigns to 10-20% of your list. The email with the most opens wins for the strongest subject line, and that with the most clickthroughs wins for the best call to action. Make any necessary changes and deploy the winning email to the rest of your subscribers. Planning a day or two in advance, adding just a few extra steps and dedicating just a bit more time you can greatly increase your profit from this one campaign.
Better yet, depending on your email service provider, you may even be able to choose the winning campaign and have it deploy automatically.
Grow Your List.
Chances are your list isn’t the size of a large corporation’s and it doesn’t have to be to be effective. A quality list takes time to build. Whether your list is 1,000 or 10 million subscribers, the steps you took to acquire your email list will determine how well it performs.
Use every opportunity to grow your list, but whatever you do, think twice, maybe even three or four times before you purchase an email list. It is worth it to spend the time growing your list organically. You will receive better response rates and keep your emails from potentially being marked as SPAM.
Online you can include a subscribe form on your website, capture email addresses at checkout. Offline you can collect addresses at trade shows and have customer service or sales always ask for a customer’s email address and permission to send information to them when on the phone. Consider offering a relevant incentive, such as an email-only discount and include it in all your promotional material.
Never add an email address to your list without receiving permission. It is not worth the lasting negative effects it could have on your overall email marketing campaigns.
Start Now.
These steps will help you get started towards email marketing like one of the big guys. Don’t be afraid to contact customer service and have them walk you through setting up a mail merge or your subscription form. You are paying for your software and you should get the full benefits from it. Every day you wait you might be losing potential revenue.
Sure once you get the basics down and find that these steps are working for you, you’ll want to implement even more changes into your email program, but by then you might have more resources to focus on your email marketing strategy. For now just start with what you have the ability to do, but take the time to properly manage your email marketing campaigns. It will be worth the effort.
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