Will Email Marketing Really Make A Difference For My Small Business?

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Infographic: 10 Email Marketing Tips to Boost Your Sales

If you’re running a small business, you may be wondering whether it’s really worth focusing on an email marketing strategy. After all, isn’t that something that only global corporations can benefit from? The answer to this is a resounding no. In fact, email marketing can make a huge difference to the success of your SME, so let’s look a little more closely at how you can harness its potential to your advantage.

How Can My Small Business Benefit From An Email Marketing Strategy?

It’s true that email marketing strategies for small businesses are very different from those employed by major corporations, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that global companies’ strategies are more effective than those used by SMEs. Rather it means their scale and tactics are different.

Actually, smaller businesses are well-placed to benefit greatly from email marketing since they have greater flexibility with regard to their image. As a smaller operation, for example, it’s possible to build up trust more rapidly with local customers when compared with bigger corporations who often fail to resonate as easily with small communities.

To benefit most from email marketing, small companies must be open, honest and as transparent as possible with their customers. Generic or unsolicited emails are now an outdated strategy and have fallen from favor since modern consumers now respond more willingly to a more organic approach. With this in mind, your focus should be on getting your customers to subscribe to newsletters where you can effectively market your products and services.

Building An Email List

So, how do you go about building a robust and powerful email list? Here are a few expert tips.

  • Make it easy for your customers to subscribe to newsletters. If there are too many hoops to jump through or steps to take, customers will simply give up at the first hurdle. Not only that, but you also need to ensure you’ve let your potential subscribers know what they can expect when it comes to the content you’ll provide before they make the commitment to sign up. If customers sign up then discover the content isn’t what they were expecting they’ll stop trusting your brand.
  • Remember that the internet today is extremely competitive, and it is challenging to increase your number of subscribers since so many companies are now competing for their attention. You must produce exclusive, high-quality content in your company’s newsletters that your customers won’t be able to find anywhere else.
  • You’re running a small business and have local clout. That means you can put your regional understanding and expertise to good use promoting your company as an expert within your area. You can achieve this conservatively and efficiently by strategically using email marketing. When you develop your reputation as a top local expert in your field through your emailed content you can cement strong customer relationships – something that is key for any small business’s success.

How Do I Measure Whether My Email Marketing Campaign Has Been Successful?

It’s essential to measure how successful your email marketing campaign is if you’re running a small business since you will need to use that information to develop an even more effective campaign.

You can measure your success rate by employing several metrics. These include:

  • Improving your email deliverability rate. If your customers aren’t receiving your emails in the first place how can your marketing campaign ever be successful? Modern email service providers have built filters to automatically weed out promotional emails from the more important ones, so making sure your important marketing messages aren’t tagged as spam and filtered out is vital.
  • Keeping a record of how many many of the emails you send out get forwarded and how many get marked as spam. Not only that, but you should compare how many emails were deleted either after or before opening. Those metrics yield vital insights that allow you to plan your future email marketing and newsletter campaigns.
  • Make sure your newsletters can be seen easily on a smartphone screen. Over 70% of people these days read their emails on mobile apps, so you need to ensure your messages and their contents are optimized for viewing on mobile devices.

What Kind Of Content Do I Need To Include in My Email Marketing?

Including valuable and engaging content in your email marketing is vital to connect with your target audience and to appeal to them on a deeper level. We’ve already mentioned that you need to use this opportunity to build trust with your customers by establishing yourself as a leading authority in your sector, but what should your content actually look like?

The key is to tailor your content around your brand. Although you need to seek ways of engaging customers with a range of subjects, you need to find some wa of tethering your brand to the subject naturally and organically to achieve the best results.

Putting The Theory Into Practice

Small businesses must recognize that email marketing doesn’t just matter – it can launch your company ahead of its competitors, bringing in brand-new customer bases, opening up new markets and building long-term customer relationships. An effective email marketing strategy allows engaging newsletter content to be delivered directly to your existing customer base and to new potential customers who are already interested in what you have to offer.

Now you understand that email marketing strategies have a key role to play in the success of your small business, it’s time to put the knowledge that you’ve gained here into practice so you can begin to reap the rewards.

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John is a serial entrepreneur and writer who is passionate about helping small businesses launch and grow. His work has been featured in Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, and Forbes.