Email is the single best marketing strategy for your small business. Period. End of story. If you can only do one single thing to promote your brand, email marketing should be it.
Why?
Well, to start: It’s the lowest-cost strategy that nets the highest results. Your return on investment should be in the neighborhood of $42 for every $1 spent.
Running a segmented campaign? Email marketing can increase your revenue by up to 760%. (That’s a real number, people.)
And email marketing only got more effective during the pandemic, with four out of five business owners saying they’d rather give up social media marketing than email marketing.
In other words: This is a marketing strategy you simply cannot go without. And you don’t have to. Here’s your starter guide to email marketing for your small business.
Why Does Email Marketing Work So Well?
How many times do you check your email each day? Well, 31% of millennials and 26% of Gen Z’ers check their email multiple times — per hour. By employing email marketing, you can reach a whole bunch of people a whole lot of times each day.
Email is also the easiest way to meet your audience wherever they are in the sales funnel. From first contact follow up and everything in between, a good email marketing strategy allows you to meet people where they are instead of playing a frustrating game of cat and mouse IRL.
Pro tip: You can’t beat a great marketing automation program when it comes to keeping track of your email strategy!
What Kinds of Emails Should You Be Sending?
If all you plan to do is send the same type of emails to the same people day in and day out, you may as well throw your laptop off the roof. That’s because no emails are better than bad emails. (You can quote us on that.)
Instead, you need to pay attention to the types of emails you’re sending and who you’re sending them to:
- Welcome emails are for people who have just signed up for your mailing list. You’re going to get in contact, tell them who you are and what you do, and keep the channels of communication open.
- Promotional emails let people know when you’re running a sale, when you’ve introduced a new product or service, or when you have something new and exciting to say.
- Newsletters keep your audience up to date on your brand. (Just remember: Newsletters aren’t for everyone.)
- Lead magnet emails are a great way to capture information by offering gated content in exchange for things you want to know about your audience.
- Reminder emails can help you find lost shoppers who have (accidentally, of course) abandoned their shopping carts or otherwise decided not to complete their purchase.
These examples only scratch the surface of the types of emails you should be sending and why. The main point is that every email should have a purpose, lest you find yourself unceremoniously diverted to the spam folder.
Quick Email Marketing Tips
Now that you know why email works and what types of emails you should be sending, here are a few tried-and-true tips:
- Don’t buy email lists. You’re just throwing good money after bad addresses. Your leads need to come organically whenever possible.
- It all starts with a good headline. If you fail on this front, your missive is going straight into the virtual trashcan.
- Personalize, personalize, personalize. “To whom it may concern” doesn’t fly here.
- Use A/B testing to find what works — and more importantly, what doesn’t.
- Make sure you clean up your mailing lists often. There’s no use sending emails to people who clearly don’t want them.
Email Marketing Is the Way to Go!
There are plenty of ways to market your small business, and we encourage you to try as many of them as possible. But email marketing will always go straight to the head of the class!
Cat got your tongue? Mischa Communications can create meticulously crafted emails that will take your small business straight to the top. Let us know how we can help.