The Best Email Marketing Tips For Small Business In 2019
Email marketing is by far one of the best ways to market your business. Year-on-year, email marketing has been rated as one of the best marketing platforms for ROI. It is simple to use, acceptable to consumers and can reach numerous customers long after you’ve sent your email.
However, many small businesses often struggle to use email marketing because, on the first few campaigns, many don’t see the returns they expect. However, email marketing success is dependent on the best practices. There are numerous tips that can help with this. So, here are our top tips for a successful email marketing campaign.
1. Segment Your Email Marketing List
The first thing you should be doing is to segment your email marketing list. Not everyone on your list is going to want the same content. Some will be interested in different products or have differing problems. Therefore, you need to find ways to distinguish between people on your email marketing list and place them in groups.
Once you’ve done this, you can send different content to these groups for higher engagement and conversion rates. This also helps with ensuring that audiences aren’t abandoning your email list because they keep getting content that is of no interest to them.
2. A/B Test Your Content
Do you really know what your audience prefers? The design, including placement, colour and even style of your email can make a huge impact on your email marketing success. The only way to know what your audience really likes is to have your content A/B tested (split testing) to ensure you’re getting the best results from your campaigns.
What you do with this is send two versions of your email and have a single difference on each email. For instance, you could have the colour of the call-to-action button different. Then on the results, you can see which version audiences preferred. Use this in the next campaign and make a new change to optimise results.
3. Use Videos In Your Content
Videos in emails are important. With today’s technology, videos can be hosted on websites like Vimeo, YouTube, or others, that can then be linked to in email for audiences to watch on their email host. Videos offer better storytelling and engagement possibilities. This can increase conversions and improve other results. Plus the videos can be used in numerous videos and in different campaigns (like on social media), so their production costs can be quickly recouped.
Videos should ideally be less than one minute and have a clear call-to-action at the end. All videos in emails should ideally be linked to the content you’re promoting.
4. Keep Text As Short As Possible
One of the most important tips is to make text as short as possible. When you use too many words and characters in an email, you’re going to lose the interest of your audience. This means they’ll abandon your content quickly and you won’t convert them. Ideally, you want no more than 300 words in an email. If you can keep your content to less than 200 that would be better.
A way to reduce words in an email is to use videos, images and other interactive content to convey your message. The audience are more likely to interact with these aspects than read text which takes longer to understand.
5. Regularly Clean Your Mailing List
When an email subscriber goes cold (i.e. no longer interested in your content). It is pointless keeping them on your list. Instead, you should regularly look through your list and identify who has not engaged with your content for the past 10-15 emails. Send them a re-engagement campaign and if they still haven’t engaged, you should unsubscribe them yourself from the list.
This reduces the cost of sending campaigns, improves results and gives you a clearer picture of the value of your email marketing list.
Take These Tips With You On Your Next Campaign
When marketing via email, you want a successful outcome. Follow the tips above for a great campaign as well as a healthy email marketing list that will be profitable and help your business grow.
Do you regularly clean your email marketing list? Do you include videos in your email content?
Let us know in the comments below.
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6 Email Marketing Tips You Don’t Want To Do
Don’t use the wrong information
If you look online, there’s a lot of advice about email marketing. Some of it’s great, it will help you expand your brand’s mailing list and convert more people, but not all the advice out there is good for your business.
Some information out there can damage your brand’s image and cost you financially. Here are six of the worst email marketing tips.
Mistake No. 1 – Buying Email Addresses
This is possibly the worst email marketing tip you could ever read. In many countries, contacting people via e-mail without their permission is against legislation. For instance, in North America and Europe, you can’t contact someone for marketing purposes without their permission.
This is a type of spam that can have your mail server blacklisted, preventing you from contacting anyone, or you could receive a fine.
Email addresses should never be bought. For some countries, particularly Canada and US states, you should be using the Double Opt-in Subscription system to ensure that audiences want to receive your marketing information.
Mistake No. 2 – Send Emails To Everyone
Like with everything, consumers are all different. They’ll have different motivations, challenges, etc. that you need to discover and market to. Sending messages that have no appeal to your audience won’t convince them to buy.
Instead, you need to segment your audience and send relevant emails to each group. Segmentation can be based on demographics (age, location, gender, occupation, etc.) or behaviours (high spenders, recent website visitors, etc.)
Mistake No. 3 – Don’t Personalise
By not even mentioning the receiver’s name on their email, you are demonstrating your lack of care for the individual. How the audience is addressed can have a massive impact on conversions.
So, don’t skimp on personalisation.
As well as addressing them by name, think about their behaviours and incorporate that in the email copy.
Mistake No. 4 – Don’t A/B Test Your Content
Testing your content against your audience is an important aspect of marketing. One of the best ways to test content is to A/B test it (split testing). This is where you divide your audience into two groups and then make a small change to the content (i.e. different font). Then you can look at the results and see which content your audience prefers.
It’s best to always test your content with one small change at a time. Your marketing campaigns should be tested regularly, as you won’t know what the best optimisation for your brand is until you’ve exhausted all possibilities. Considering there are an unlimited number of combinations, this should mean there is never a time you won’t be testing.
Mistake No. 5 – Text All In Capital Letters
Have you ever read an email or text in capital letters? It seems like that the person is shouting to get your attention. This isn’t the image you want to portray; why would anyone buy from you if you are shouting at them? They are more likely to unsubscribe and never engage with your brand again.
While capital letters can be used to highlight something in an email, it should seldom be used. It’s much better to highlight content using bold lettering or a call to action.
Mistake No. 6 – Send Your Emails Whenever You Want
Another piece of poor advice is to not worry about what time you send emails. Firstly, this can damage visibility of your content. If you send them at busy periods, then your marketing messages will be lost in the sea of emails someone receives.
Secondly, if you send the emails at the wrong time, the email could be ignored, and they might not catch the email until the offer has expired.
Instead, you need to discover the best time for your brand to send emails. While there’s a lot of information available about this online, it might not be accurate. Every audience has different behaviours, and therefore, you should test your audience’s preferences.
Conclusion
Email marketing is one of the best ways to promote your business and convert customers. There is a lot of information online about the ‘best practices’ for email marketing, just be sure you are reading the best advice from a reputable source.
What bad advice have you been given? What happened to your business’ marketing campaigns as a result?
Let us know in the comments below.
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