A Guide on Small Business Email Marketing — Benefits & Best Practices

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Budgeting is one of the main concerns for every small business. You need a way to generate a steady stream of new leads while maintaining a strong relationship with your existing customer base. The question you’re probably asking yourself is — how do I manage this effectively without spending a lot of money?

Despite what plenty of marketers will tell you, the answer is simple — by making the most of email marketing. 

Email marketing is one of the most fruitful and cost-effective solutions out there. For starters, email is used by about 4 billion people worldwide every day. This means that you can find your target audience and create a highly relevant marketing campaign easily. In terms of revenue, email generates $38 for every $1 that you spend. This constitutes an amazing 3,800% ROI.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re running a small business or an enterprise. Any organization can benefit from a well-crafted email marketing campaign. 

If the sheer numbers aren’t convincing enough, we’re going to help you learn about the major benefits of email marketing and present you with some of the essential practices for creating a successful email marketing campaign. 

The Benefits of Email Marketing for Small Business Owners

Aside from the astounding return on investment, small businesses can reap many of the different benefits that email marketing can provide. This includes:

1. Flexibility and customization

2. Simplified sharing

3. Access to crucial analytics

4. Effective relationship building

5. Easy automation

Flexibility and Customization

You can customize a wide range of email marketing campaign aspects whenever required. This includes your email design, content, target audience, personalization, etc. As opposed to websites that are supposed to work as a cohesive whole, your email campaigns can be optimized in line with specific audiences and seasonal requirements

Simplified Sharing 

Emails can spread around fast in the word-of-mouth fashion. Your contacts may be the only recipients, but you should provide them with the option to share your emails with other interested parties. Your subscribers can play a crucial role in growing your contact list

Access to Crucial Analytics 

Email campaigns enable you to determine how customers perceive your business and help you improve your marketing efforts. Plenty of email marketing software pieces enable you to track crucial KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) such as open and click-through rates

Effective Relationship Building

By ensuring that your contacts lists are based on consensual opt-ins and proper sources of prospect information, you will have an audience primed for your marketing efforts. Your recipients will be interested in getting to know more about you. This is the perfect way to start creating strong relationships that result in high conversion rates

Easy Automation

Email marketing can be easily set on autopilot. As a result, your marketing efforts will require less time and fewer resources

Now that we’ve covered how your small business can benefit from email marketing, let’s take a look at some of the essential practices for creating email marketing campaigns. This includes:

1. Mapping out the customer journey

2. Making subscription forms simple and enticing

3. Segmenting your lists and personalizing your content

4. Ensuring your emails align with applicable regulations

5. Passing the spam filters

6. Creating short and direct emails

7. Testing your emails

8. Analyzing the performance of your email campaigns

9. Using email marketing automation tools

Mapping Out the Customer Journey

All the emails you send should align with the overarching goal, which is lead nurturing. While you may want to focus on increasing your sales, your email marketing campaign has to revolve around engagement. About 50% of qualified leads aren’t prepared to make a purchase. Your task is to provide them with a fantastic customer journey and convert them into loyal customers naturally. 

You need to map out every step of the lead-nurturing process. The type of emails you send should be aligned with the lead’s position in the customer journey. Every customer journey is divided into three stages:

1. Awareness

2. Consideration

3. Decision

Awareness

Leads in the awareness stage have realized that they’ve got a problem that needs to be addressed. They are looking to learn more about this issue and aren’t ready to consider possible solutions yet.

Consideration

The consideration stage begins when leads start to look for solutions to their issue actively. You can gain more information about them and learn how to craft the best content for their needs.

Decision

In the decision stage, leads are ready to make a purchase. This is when you need to present your content as the best solution for their problem.

The Best Type of Content for Each Customer Journey Stage

In line with a lead’s position in the customer journey, you’ll want to send them a specific type of content. Here are some examples:

Making Subscription Forms Simple and Enticing

If you want as many people as possible to subscribe to your mailing list, you have to make your subscription forms straightforward and eye-catching. Ask your website visitors to sign up directly. Stick to a simple design and as little text as possible. The location of your subscription forms is crucial. The best course of action is to focus on relevant pages where you’ve already engaged your visitors. 

You should consider these options for placing your subscription forms:

• About page — As we have previously established, leads in the early stage of the customer journey want to learn more about you. Your About page is presenting your brand and vision. If they are impressed by what your company is about, this would be the perfect place to invite them to subscribe

• Footer, header, and navigation — While these may not be the primary sections for boosting your conversion rates, they can be effective spots for offering incentives that will increase your visitors’ interest

• Blog — Your blog pages are one of the primary sources of valuable information about your company, products, and expertise. This is where you can educate your leads on matters relevant to their issues, and invite them to opt in for your mailing list and be informed whenever you post something new

• Pop-ups — Pop-up forms can be efficient when they don’t hinder the customer experience. You can implement exit-intent pop-ups that show up when a visitor attempts to leave your website. Let them know about what they may be missing out on, and ask them to sign up for your mailing list

You also need to set up expectations with appropriate confirmation emails. Whenever someone subscribes to your list, they should receive an email that will inform them about what comes next. Welcome them into the fold and provide them with the steps they can take to move along the sales funnel.

Segmenting Your Lists and Personalizing Your Content

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Email list segmentation is essential for creating highly targeted audiences you can tailor specific content for. There is a wide range of ways to divide your contacts into groups, including factors such as:

• Demographics — age, sex, gender, ethnicity, occupation

• Firmographics — industry, job title, company size, annual revenue

• Psychographics — values, opinions, attitudes, interests, lifestyles

• Behavioral characteristics — benefits sought, brand interactions, purchasing habits, customer journey stage

While creating separate mailing lists for every segment is an option, you can simplify the process by using email list management software tools to send emails based on specified filters.

Aside from creating relevant content for every contact group, you should implement personalization features. People love communicating with businesses as if they’re talking to another human being. This is why referring to them by their name and adding other personal details can increase their engagement. 

Plenty of email software solutions enable you to include lead information in your emails automatically via shortcodes and email marketing automation features.

You can include details such as:

• Name

• Job title

• Company

• Location

This kind of approach will make your contacts feel like you care about their needs and interests. They will also trust that you can provide the value that they’re after.

Ensuring Your Emails Align With Applicable Regulations

Email marketing is based on permission. This means that your recipients can opt out of receiving your emails, and you need to comply with their decision. If you avoid doing so, you will tarnish your reputation by getting your emails labeled as spam. 

You should also keep in mind that you can face severe financial penalties if you don't comply with applicable regulations. Many countries have strict laws that protect the privacy of users. This includes:

• The CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing) Act — applicable in the United States

• The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) — applicable in all the countries that are members of the European Union

• The CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation) — applicable in Canada

Passing Spam Filters

Each spam filter has a scoring filter based on a specific set of rules. For plenty of email service providers, a 0.1% complaint rate is considered reasonable. While you can’t cover every possible aspect that a particular spam filter might flag, there are some general rules that you should follow. Here are some of them:

• Ensure your emails don’t have little text and many images

• Manage your lists properly to avoid emailing spam traps and non-existent accounts 

• Refrain from sounding overly salesy by writing in all caps and using spam trigger words

Even if you pass the spam filters, your recipients might label your emails as spam. This is something you have much less control over, but you should avoid practices such as: 

• Sending sales pitches to unengaged leads

• Making the unsubscription process too complicated

• Being vague about who you are and what your email is about

Creating Short and Direct Emails

The majority of your recipients will scan your emails for valuable information. This is why it is essential to keep the message short and to the point. 

Your emails also need to be structured properly. You can break the text into paragraphs so that the keywords stand out. Images are an efficient method for segmenting the content and drawing attention to specific sections. Use lists and bullet points to make particular pieces of information more digestible. 

Testing Your Emails

You need to test your emails to determine which elements get the best results. The two most commonly used types of tests are:

1. Split testing

2. Multivariate testing

Split Testing

Split testing — also known as A/B testing — is based on choosing two contact groups you send two email variants to. You need to focus on a single aspect of your email to get the most accurate results. Here are some of the elements you can split test:

• CTA

• Image

• Headline

• Subject line

• Text layout

Multivariate Testing

The goal of multivariate testing is to determine which combination of elements works the best for your target audience. You can test the performance of a particular piece of content based on font choice, text layout, and complementary images.

Analyzing the Performance of Your Email Campaigns 

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After every email campaign, you need to take a look at the analytics. There is a wide range of metrics that you should track to help you determine which aspects of your emails need improvement. When it comes to small business email marketing, these are the most important parameters:

Using Email Marketing Automation Tools

Email marketing automation tools enable you to streamline most of the marketing processes. You can generate leads automatically, manage your contact, send personalized emails, create highly targeted lists through self-segmentation, etc. By doing so, you can focus on other crucial aspects that require a human agent, such as creating attention-grabbing CTAs, eye-catching subject lines, and engaging pieces of content. According to Funnel Overload’s report, marketing automation increases productivity by 20%.

If you’re looking for effective marketing automation software, we at Sell SaaS have got a solution for you. Our software bundle has an assortment of marketing tools for your outreach and lead generation efforts.

You can check out our email campaign creator — an autoresponder tool for creating high-quality email campaigns. It enables you to design and compose your emails in a simple online editor. Use the autoresponder feature to send them at a particular time or when your contacts perform a specific action. The campaign creator also has a tracking feature that helps you determine the deliverability rates of your emails.

Other Sell SaaS Marketing Tools You Should Try

We’ve got a wide range of tools that go hand in hand with our email campaign creator. You can try our:

If you sign up for any of our products, you’ll get unlimited monthly access to all the features.

What makes our deal stand out from the competition is that we offer white-label software. This means that you can create an additional stream of revenue by branding and reselling our products at a price that suits your business needs.

All you need to do is become our partner. Your only obligation is to share a percentage of all your sales. You start by earning 60%. If your sales are successful, you can become our Super Master SaaS Partner and get 80% of the revenue.

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